Mastering Emotions and Maximizing Energy in Financial Decisions ep 1414

How much of your own emotions and energy go into your financial decisions? Dr. Julia DiGangi joins Joe to chat about how to master your emotions and maximize your energy. She teaches us how to recognize stress triggers so you can control your emotions and energy before they get out of hand. What proactive steps can we take to master our emotions?

She will help each of us self-analyze our relationship with money – the emotional energy and emotional relationship. What would your money say about you and how you treat it? What kind of energy and emotions are you treating it with?

In our headline, we look at an encouraging trend in minority populations in the US with regard to how many people are working with financial professionals.

We’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to Mark who has a question about target-date funds. Plus, Doug may or may not try to pull a fast one on us with his American history-themed trivia.

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

Enjoy!

Our Headlines

• Diverse Americans are returning to financial advisors for retirement planning (InvestmentNews)

Dr. Julia DiGangi

Big thanks to Dr. Julia DiGangi for joining us today. To learn more about Dr. DiGangi, visit Dr. Julia DiGangi (drjuliadigangi.com). Grab yourself a copy of the book Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power

Doug’s Trivia

• On this day in 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was the capital of what for exactly one day?

Need life insurance? You could be insured in 20 minutes or less and build your family’s safety net for the future. Use StackingBenjamins.com/HavenLife to calculate how much you need and apply.

• Chicago-based Stacker Mark has the gall to ask our take on a target-date fund strategy that has us scratching our heads in confusion. OG has thoughts.

Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?

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

Join Us Friday!

Learn how to achieve wellbeing by empowering your family’s financial and human capital with the founder of Family and Money Matters, Elaine King. She’ll join Paula and Len on our weekly roundtable.

Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: Secrets to Unbreakable Confidence and Financial Success (ep 1413).

Episode transcript

 So,

faced with a question, where do they go next with this podcast? The guys were recently joined by legendary musical genius, Bruce Dickerson, who’s agreed to be the new producer of the Stacking Benjamins show. They were all excited

to meet him. Hey fellas, I’m Bruce Dickerson, yes, the Bruce Dickerson. You have a dynamite sound, fantastic sound.

I have only one suggestion.

Drum roll. Ding. More

cowbell. Music.

Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s the Stacking Benjamins show.

I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and today you’ll learn how to master your emotions with Dr. Julia Daganji. In our headlines, good news and bad news. People are seeking financial advice in record numbers, but, we knew that was coming, they also think that advice may be too expensive. We’ll share the stats and our thoughts.

Plus, we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to stacker Mark. We love Mark! And then, I’ll share some municipal trivia. Municipal? Yeah, I’m gonna do it. And now, two guys who together form the world’s mediumest human pretzel. It’s Joe and O J J J J G!

You know, that makes sense, Doug, because sometimes I think in pretzels, oh gee, that the, uh, that, that they’re too doughy and soft. And then I went to Bavaria and I thought I was going to chip a tooth on the pretzel. So the medium is, I think is a good, uh, good place to be. Doughy

and soft on the inside and crunchy and hard and just gritty on the outside.

Ripped.

Yes. That’s not at all what I was going for. And here, I know it wasn’t. That’s why I had to take corrective action. We’ve got. The guy who’s salty on the outside, though. How about that? Now you’re firing on all cylinders. Nice job. Mr. OG is here. The

saltiest. There it is.

Absolutely. How are you, man?

Feeling very pretzel y today? No,

no, not at all. Just, uh, very much a, I can’t think of anything. Just a non pretzel y day? Yep.

Well, we got a great show and I can tell OG’s getting emotional already about his pretzel stuff. You guys can’t tell cause you’re not hanging out with us live, but. Oh, gee, looks all emotional, very emotional.

This is my emotional face.

You do know, you do know that so many investors get emotional and we do stupid stuff when our emotions are in charge.

And Dr. DeGange is going to help us turn that around, use our emotions to help us instead of make us go,

why did I do that? Second, that emotion or.

She will second that emotion should be fantastic. But before that, a very, uh, salty headline as well. But, uh, even before that, well, let’s go over the guest bio OG.

So then after that, Dr. DeGangi did this, and that doesn’t even include any of the stuff we’re going to talk about on her bio. This woman’s amazing. All kinds of stuff. Hey, Dr. Julie DeGenge joining us to talk emotions in investing. But before that, this headline, so let’s go.

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 Investment News. Here’s a new study out, OG, from Alliance, uh, reported on by Steve Randall. Reported dip in engagement with financial advisors by diverse Americans in 2022 appears to be reversing. Last year, Alliance Life reported that just 24 of black investors, 35 percent of Hispanic investors, had a professional financial advisor and 44 percent in 2021.

However, new stats for 2023 reveal that 36 percent of black Americans and 42% Of Hispanic Americans now working with a financial advisor, and this aligns with a rise in confidence among these groups that their finances are in shape to support life goals and ambitions, which is 80%. I don’t understand how we get more confident, and that’s when we go for an advisor?

It seems like you go for an advisor when you’re… less confident, doesn’t it?

Is there some sort of thought around, you know, I’m not good enough to have an advisor. Is that

maybe it? Maybe that’s it. Maybe you’re so not confident. You’re like, I didn’t know what questions to ask.

This reminds me of something we talked about a couple of years ago is one of the really big financial institutions that found out that when people are embarrassed about their money situation, they don’t want to talk to humans.

So their phone system had the automated attendant that would jump in and If, you know, if you felt good about your situation, you’d go to a human.

What if you just don’t want to talk to humans? Ever , regardless of

confidence level. I think the lesson there, uh, this came from Capital One, by the way. It was Doug.

We did, we talked about Capital One. See, I listen. If you have a high credit score, you want to concierge level service, you do not want to be in automated menu. So Capital One will route you immediately to a person. If you have a low credit score, you’re embarrassed to your point, Doug. It’s like a

fun party game.

Call the 800 number for Capital One and see who answers. And then you know, Hello, this is Jody. How can I help you? You’re like, what up?

I just looked, I just looked up my credit score for free. Turns out it’s pretty bad. They’re like,

please press one to be disconnected. Please press two to be also disconnected.

Yes. Welcome to Capital One. Please God, go away. Goodbye.

All circuits

are busy. This is not supposed to turn into bashing Capital One. This is about human

emotions. I’m saying that it would be fun party game to see who gets the automated attendant versus who gets a live person. So everybody dials on like speakerphone at game night.

Yeah. Game night, you dial up Capital One. you put in your social and they, you know, for me, they would just go click. They’re just, they wouldn’t even, there’s like a third tier nobody talks about. Do you think it has to do with feeling about like embarrassed or is it like worthiness or is that kind of the same thing?

Like I’m not worthy to have, I don’t have enough money. Is that an embarrassment thing or is that just a? Practicality of like, I, I’ve, I’m not embarrassed. I’m just, I got 20 grand. I don’t need an

advisor. It is interesting, O. G., because what I should have done, what I should have done was read the next

sentence.

Did I foreshadow? Is it future again?

Apparently you did. It’s like genius. Uh, they write for those that are not currently getting professional financial advice, around three in 10 believe they don’t have enough money to warrant it. around 15 percent do not trust financial advisors around one third think it costs too much. And this goes up to a 46 percent among Asian American respondents, by the way.

So people of Asian descent thinking it’s, it’s too expensive. So there’s all kinds of reasons. Yeah. Financial advisors, costing too much is interesting. And I know, Oh gee, when Michael Kitsis was on the show, he was talking about this word advisors, that there is a different, anybody can call himself an advisor.

When I was at Camp Phi, our, our friend, Roger Whitney was going on about that, about how horrible that, you know, the, there’s this, you can do anything, call yourself a financial advisor. Eric Brotman on the show recently said that. So a lot of these pros in the business that are advice givers, oh gee, you know, they roll their eyes when they see somebody who’s just a product salesman called himself a financial advisor.

Oh, it’s no different than the fiduciary word, which is comical to me at every level because Nobody uses it correctly. The government doesn’t enforce it worth a damn. There’s no regulations around the usage of it. There’s a real popular, uh, not popular, there’s a big firm that’s advertising a lot in Dallas, and they’re specifically talking about, it’s all fear and panic marketing, basically, like, oh, the market’s down, you’re gonna run out of money, inflation is through the roof, you know, it’s all that kind of, you know, fear sells type of deal.

And by the way, if you invest your money, we’ll give you a 25 percent bonus on your, you know, income for life. If you invest by such and such a time. Okay. What product in the universe of products, Joe, you know, this offers an upfront bonus for putting money

in. That would be an annuity.

That’s an annuity.

This guy on TV is like, we are fiduciaries, and we, we don’t sell any commissioned products. He’s blatantly saying all of this stuff, and then it’s like, now, to be fair, honestly, you can, as a fiduciary, you can sell annuities. and not receive the commission. Sure. But I’ve never known anybody, I’ve been doing this 26 years, I’ve never known anybody to do that.

Your research, Joe, proves that, right? When you went to that annuity lifetime income thing. It did. And he said, as soon as we take away the commissions, what happens to the product sales? It goes in the toilet. Why? Because the product sucks and it has to be, you know, it has to be wrapped in this big, you know, this big pot of money for somebody to figure out a way to sell it to somebody else.

Like that’s, that’s the only way that those things exist. So even big brands that are advertising on TV. Nobody uses the word correctly. And so that’s, you know, financial advisor, fiduciary, whatever. I, I’m with, I’m with Kitsis on this. It’s a terminology that, I mean, a car wash salesman can, could call himself a financial advisor and there’s no ramifications for it.

That’s what’s so weak about the term. This is

why I get so frustrated with a lot of financial writers. It’s because financial writers, when they write about hiring a financial advisor, they say the first thing you should ask is, am I a fiduciary? Are they a fiduciary? Second thing you should ask is, what do you charge?

Yeah, fiduciary. You already explained why that can just get, that’s just getting blown up. Nobody’s enforcing

it. I mean, A, you could use it incorrectly or B, you could just lie

about it. And there’s no, the second thing though, I hate this idea of asking about fees. The first question is what are you going to do for me?

The feed, if the fee’s huge and they’re going to do nothing for you or nothing that fits your lifestyle or what you need or the support system that you need behind you, well then don’t hire them. But if they tell you what they’re going to do and then you can do the math and you’re like, okay, yeah, that fee fits, then hire them.

It’s a

value based concept here. No different than any other sort of professional relationship that you have. Right? I mean, rarely do you go to the, your, your physician and say, where did you go to medical school? Right? You just go, I’m at a doctor’s office. Therefore I must be talking to a doctor. No, very few people actually look there.

Doctor up, right? They’re physician up. You just go, I’m, I’m, I’m here. So therefore I must be, right? So be it. I don’t know that I’ve ever asked my doctor how much it costs. I did ask, uh, I was at a children’s hospital, how much, you know, a broken arm would cost. And they went, yeah, we don’t know until we do it.

So there’s a whole, you want to open up a Pandora’s box of conversation. Let’s talk about the medical system and pricing in America and how great, how I’ll see through that is how transparent that is, right? How the hell did we get here? Well, we’re just talking about professionals and well, it is,

it is, it is very congruent.

Just like a commission salesperson will not correct you when, you know, you’re trying to delineate them from an advice giver versus a salesperson. They won’t correct you. I know. Some doctors, I have friends that are doctors and I’ll tell you what, and I know we have many nurse practitioners in our audience and they do a heck of a job.

The thing that frustrates doctors in my community is there’s a couple doctors in particular that we know that O. G. never, ever, ever correct. The patient when they call them doctor so and so, they don’t say, no, no, no, I’m a medical, no, no, no, I am the same. And it just rubs the doctor the wrong way. Who’s had all this additional training and I’m not, I’m not ripping nurse practitioners.

They do a heck of a job. They know what the hell they’re talking about, but you’re not a doctor, but it’s not the same. And maybe that’s not even congruent. Maybe that’s a little different thing. Doug’s nodding his head, shaking his head. Doug’s

like, that’s not it. I mean, there’s a lot of things here that, that are.

Synergistic, I think, between any sort of professional services, whether it’s, you know, law or medicine or financial planning or whatever, it’s like, You know, you have to do your research and background on the, on the person, but it’s really a value based operation. You’re not going to go to a divorce attorney for a traffic court ticket.

You know, it’s like you have to find out what it is that you need. Does the person that you’re talking to provide that in a way that offsets the cost that they charge? And if it’s, and if they do over long periods of time, it’s worth it every time. If they don’t, then

they

don’t. Let’s talk about the other part of this though.

Oh, gee, that’s exciting. We brought this up before about just nationally. There is, there’s nowhere near enough financial planners who are advice givers to serve the national population of the United States. I don’t know about the many people listening to the show worldwide, but in the USA, we don’t have enough financial planners and it gets even worse.

When we talk about financial planners of color, we talk about black financial advisors and Hispanic financial advisors, man, if somebody listening to us is in a Hispanic community, a black community, if that’s your heritage. Like you have a population that needs you, I think is what this says too. We could use more financial planners and all across the board, but especially in those communities.

Yeah, a hundred percent. And what’s neat about the industry now that of course, it wasn’t the same, Joe, when you and I started this little endeavor some, some odd years ago is that there’s actually, there’s actually career paths for this now where, where, you know, to be fair, you and I were both on the sales side of things at the very beginning, right?

It was like, Hey, you can fog a spoon. Here you go. Here’s a phone book. There’s a phone. Go see if you can go get clients. Go sit

in

a room and call people

that you don’t know. Yeah. Go see how it goes. And now you can graduate from Texas tech or Kansas state or other places that have certificate programs in financial planning.

You know, you can, you can have a degree in financial planning and that’s a, that’s a viable education and career path now. So as you’re looking at, you know, if you’re a young person trying to figure out what to do, this is a pretty awesome gig.

Still don’t have one in podcasting. Still not a viable career option.

It’s

not a viable career option in podcasting. Not, not yet.

Someday we can only hope. Uh, we will link to this and, uh, these great heady topics on our show notes at stackybenjamins. com. Of course, tomorrow, uh, Kevin Bailey from our team will. Dive into these even deeper. If you’re interested in either of these topics in our newsletter called the 2 0 1 stacky benjamins.com/ 2 0 1, we go over the 1 0 1 here and then we go into depth with Kevin Curates some of the best links to all of these issues.

Of course, if you get the 2 0 1 and you know somebody who’s thinking about becoming a financial planner or worried about whether they should have one or not, there’s a referral program. So if you get it, you know somebody don’t just tell ’em to read our 2 0 1. Make sure you use your referral code and we will send you everything from stickers to a notebook to swag to, if you’re for lots of people, a game night with OG and I in mom’s basement, which I know people dream about.

It’s generally what they want. Coming up next, Dr. Julia DeGangi has worked all over the place, notably receiving her PhD from DePaul University. her residency at Boston Consortium where she was a clinical fellow at this little place called the Harvard Medical School, never heard of it, and a teaching fellow at Boston University School of Medicine.

She, uh, has worked with people in the area of PTSD among other things. She also has been around the world in places working with traumatized and underserved communities, like people in Nigeria, Iraq, Kenya, she has worked in all kinds of different places. She is very concerned about our emotional struggles and when it comes to money, Man, there is a lot going on there emotionally that, uh, becomes blocks in our path.

We’re going to talk about turning that around with her in just a moment, but to get there, first Doug, I think you’ve got some trivia for us.

Sure do, Joe. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Today we’re going back to a time when stacking Benjamins could only mean piling up a bunch of dudes named Benji onto each other’s shoulders long before the 100 bill was first minted.

William Penn. Founded Pennsylvania as a haven for Quakers. Imagine! A whole state devoted to a breakfast cereal. Love it! Today, the state is still home to the largest population of Quakers in the country. Although, tragically, not many other breakfast cereals. Most people know Pennsylvania for things like the Hershey’s

candy There is still a few people doing tricks, though, across the country.

No? Where’s the sound effect? The ba dum tss? Come on. Come on! Yeah, thank you. I’m going to continue. Most people know Pennsylvania for things like the Hershey’s Candy Company, the World of Little League Museum, and of course, the Liberty Bell. I wonder if they’ll ever get around to fixing that thing. Being one of the OG colonies, Pennsylvania is loaded with cool history.

On top of all the famous stuff, the historically Amish city of Lancaster. is the site of the country’s first farmer’s market, as well as the oldest pretzel bakery. Today’s trivia question is, On this day in 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania was the capital of what for exactly one day? I’ll be back right after I get the recipe for s’mores from Joe’s mom.

Hey there stackers, I’m Lake County Little League quarterfinalist and s’more chef. Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug. Today’s trivia question is on this day in 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania was the capital of what for exactly one day? The answer? The United States. When the Continental Congress had to flee from the British in Philadelphia, they settled in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for one day, probably for those pretzels, making the city the nation’s temporary capital.

And I thought moving a bachelor pad was a pain. And now, here to teach you how to harness the power of your brain to reach greater levels of success, it’s Dr. Julia DeGangi.

And coming down to the card table, I’m so happy she’s here with us, Dr. Julia DeGangi’s here. How are

you? I’m so glad to be here, Joe.

Thank you for having me.

I’m good. Well, I’m so happy. And you know, you met mom, so you know the emotions around being in mom’s basement. So thank you for helping us keep her even keel. I’m just fascinated by your career. Before we get into this, you did something completely different. What did you do before you were in this particular

career?

So I’m a neuropsychologist now, and you’re right now too many people have heard of a neuropsychologist. So that just means I’m a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain, and I never thought I would end up here. And I come from a sort of a lineage of psychologist. My father is a psychologist.

Oh. So I just always thought it was like his thing, you know? And he wasn’t territorial about it. I just was like, You don’t do that because that’s what your dad does, but I sort of grew up in a family that paid a lot of attention to emotion, for better and for worse, a lot of attention to behavior. My father would always have very interesting, compelling stories.

My mother worked with immigrants her whole career, and my brother is disabled. So, there was always kind of a, a curiosity in our home about behavior, and there was always a message about service. So, you know, kind of this idea very early in my life that we’re here to serve others. And so I started out my career doing a lot of political work, and then ultimately international humanitarian aid work.

And what ended up happening was, wherever I was on the planet, Whether it was Chicago, or Mombasa, or Detroit, or Lagos, or Argentina, I started to see people suffering in both kind of common ways and also in extraordinary ways. And the thing that really struck me was that conflict. always looked like conflict.

Grief always felt like grief. Loss always felt like loss. Rage always felt like rage. Hope always felt like hope. And so I started to get very curious about the brain and how the brain really gives rise to our entire existence. And so that ended me into sort of the scientific study of human emotions and human relationships.

And so here

I am. It is fascinating how that real life experience made you go, you know what, I really want to dive more into the brain. I think it’s interesting. You, you talk in this project about how the science has kind of changed. It used to be, we’d have the emotion, we can’t do anything about the emotion, so we just have to deal with it.

But now you say the science has really moved. If I got this right, the science has moved to yes, the emotion, the emotion is going to happen. It’s just going to come out, but we can really be much more effective than we used to think. about changing our life and changing our outcomes based on, based on what?

Based on how we, how we respond to the

emotion? Joe, I think you nailed it. So I think for a long time, there was kind of this message that we are the victim to our emotions, that things happen to us all day long, every day of our life. And then. We’re just kind of stuck with our feelings and what we’re really starting to understand, certainly from neuroscience, is that number one, emotions and thinking are not really separate entities.

In other words, the way that you think, the way that you pay attention, the way that you make decisions, the way that you even remember is informed by emotional circuits in the brain. Okay, so like, there are sort of like two sides of the same coin, and that emotions are, I mean, quite literally a neuroelectrical energy.

They’re an actual entity or a thing that’s happening inside of our body, and we absolutely have authority over our emotions. And the reason this is so important is that emotions form the meaning of our life. I know you do some really powerful work around business and money and financial literacy. Money has everything to do with our feelings.

How much is enough? How much is too little? Things about, you know, sufficiency or insufficiency. And one of the things I think is an incredibly powerful shift for people when it comes to money is a lot of times we don’t realize this, but we are absolutely in a relationship with money. So sometimes I’ll ask my clients or my patients who come to me for money issues, it’s like, if you and money went to therapy, what would money say about you?

Right. Right.

Yeah. That you don’t pay any attention to me, that you only think about me when you’re panicked, that you’re angry about me, that there’s always insufficiency, right? So, and if we think about what this really is, it’s an emotional energy. It’s an emotional relationship. And when we really start to think about our lives in these emotional terms, it becomes so empowering and so transformative.

What was, speaking of transformative, something that was transformative for me as I was reading your words was that there’s this paradox going on, right? And there’s, there’s these two central players in this paradox. And I’d love for you to, as a way to kind of dive into this, Explain these, these two concepts.

We have emotional power and emotional pain. Can we talk about the two of them and then the juxtaposition and the paradox going on between

the two of them? Absolutely. I would love to talk about that. When people ask me, what do I do? I really say I root my work in the brain, emotional pain and emotional power.

So if you think about the brain. It’s not all that big, right? For most of us, it’s less than three pounds, and it’s extraordinary. From this three pound blob of, like, primordial goo, the whole of human consciousness rises, right? Well, because the brain is not that big, it’s gotten very efficient with how it uses its real estate.

So when you have a bad feeling, whether it’s you’re just irritated in traffic, you’re annoyed by your spouse, you’re frustrated by social media, All the way up to you’re traumatized. So any bad feeling, there’s parts of your brain that give rise to those bad feelings are the same parts of your brain. So it’s, it’s a difference in kind of degree.

It’s not a difference in, in quality, right? So when we feel bad, we feel bad. And when we learn how to work with bad feeling from the mild to the most extreme, it tends to work across the board. The converse is true too. When we think about the most empowering things in our life, it’s never really about situations.

It’s about feeling. Do we feel confident? Do we feel safe? Do we feel connected? Do we feel expressed? Do we feel authentic? And what I kind of call all of this is do we feel whole? The most powerful human being is not the human being that has to go around posturing and pretending and amputating entire sections of ourselves because we think they’re somehow unacceptable.

The most powerful human being on the planet says This is who I am. If you think about this kind of mathematically, it makes perfect sense. Right? So if you’re, for example, you’re an energetic being and there are energies in your body that you like. So there’s probably things you like about yourself. And then there’s things you don’t like about yourself.

Well, if we have to spend our whole life pretending, I’m going to hide this part about myself and I’m going to shove this part of myself down and I’m going to deny that part of myself, what you’re really doing again, from this kind of like. The physics of emotion is you’re saying, I’m going to subtract that energy from me and I’m going to subtract that energy and I’m going to subtract that energy and you do that enough times and you do that for enough years of your life, you end up pretty depleted, pretty exhausted.

Pretty self rejecting, and just frankly, and I don’t mean this term pejoratively, but pretty weakened. There’s this much more powerful version of all of us that exists when we say let me express all of my humanity. I mean, it’s kind of like two plus two equals four. So isn’t it interesting that so many of us get ourselves into all these tangles by trying to deny parts of us that are just as obvious as gravity makes things fall down?

Well, this is a

powerful piece for me, was that, you know, I feel like most, most of your life and most of people around you say, you know, you shouldn’t have feelings about this. You should stop feeling about this. And you’re telling us that’s impossible. You’re going to feel it no matter what you do. So it isn’t about the fact that you’re feeling or not feeling, the feelings are going to happen.

Your brain’s going to make them. You have a great thing that you say, by the way, which is you can have all the strategies you want. Your brain doesn’t work on strategy. I’d never heard this before. Your brain doesn’t work on strategy. Your brain works on emotion. Your brain is all about emotion. So it’s, it’s not about.

Curtailing the emotion like duct taping it off. It’s about letting it go. But then what do you do with it?

100 percent right and like I think everyone will resonate with this like there’s been times in our life Where we have all of our ducks in the best strategic row possible, right? We have the right team We have the right ideas.

We have the right things on paper We have the right and it’s like For some reason, it’s not working. People do this all the time. Um, I, I also work as a psychologist and so I, I do a lot of work with couples and I can’t tell you how many times people will come to me and say, this person is totally right for me on paper.

But it is just not

happening. Oh, you’ve heard that a hundred times. There just is no, quote, magic, right?

Exactly. And the reason is, the energy is off. The other thing that’s kind of even struck me in my own life is, like, sometimes I’ll do, you know, ever since I got this book deal, I’ve been doing more social media stuff.

And I haven’t done a lot of social media stuff in my life. I’ve been kind of a private academic for most of my life. But what sort of has struck me is, like, sometimes I’ll, like, really spend a lot of time on the quality of the video or whatever. And, like, It’s fine, but the posts that always do the best is when it’s just like me talking very authentically.

And when I, a lot of times when I’ll post that post, I’ll be like, Oh God, like I flubbed my words or, you know, my hair was all jacked up or whatever. Right. And it’s like human beings. I say this all the time. It gives me chills every time I say it. The thing we want. More than anything else on this planet is access to ourselves, access to our own power.

Now, what’s really important, because I know a lot of the people that listen to your show are leaders, and what happens is we have to understand that emotions are a thing of contagion. I don’t mean this metaphorically, I mean this neuroscientifically. Like, neuroscience shows us that we can catch each other’s emotions.

And you know this is true because you’ve had it happen hundreds of times in your own life where you’re in a good mood and you walk into a room where people are not having a great day, Joe. Two minutes later, your mood sinks like a lead balloon. Yeah. The other thing I like, this is one of my favorites, is have you ever walked into a room where people are like cracking up, you actually have no idea what they’re even laughing about, and you’re now like also laughing hysterically.

Yeah, yeah. Because we catch each other’s emotions. So when we have the power to show up, Authentically, it reminds people, often unconsciously, but it doesn’t matter, emotional transactions are still a thing. It reminds people the thing they want the most in this lifetime, which is access to their own wholeness, which is access to their own power.

What I think is so cool about this message, and it’s not even my message necessarily, right? It’s just like the way the brain works. It’s the way the nervous system works. We make our lives so much harder than they have to be. It gets to be a lot more enjoyable and a lot more effortless when we just trust the fullness of our emotional experience.

Yeah, that is the paradox that instead of looking away from the pain, we actually look toward the pain to inform our power, which is, which is pretty wild. You have an example in the first chapter of your book that I’d love for you to tell our stackers about. This is an entrepreneur named Krish, if you remember.

Krish, you write, had long dreamed of merging his love with real estate with the gift of teaching and that really wasn’t working out. Can you tell us about Krish?

Yeah. So Krish is a client of mine and was incredibly gifted. And so we had this idea to basically start this training program and it went very successfully on paper.

In other words, like, the training program was going well, lots of students were enrolling, but the problem was he felt awful. And the reason he felt awful, I think a lot of people are gonna resonate with this, because I certainly do, is he had, was basically outsourcing all of his power people pleasing. So he wasn’t honoring his own boundaries.

So, for example, people would ask for a refund well after the refund period, and he felt like he had to give the refund. Or people were asking for additional accommodations, and he felt like he needed to make all these accommodations. And so, he was really confused, like, how could I have wanted this for so long?

How could it be going so well for me on paper, and yet why do I feel so bad? I call this, and I think this is such a big moment when we can really see it, I call this the pain of self division. Now, I am a trauma researcher, and I am a trauma clinician, so I am very, very clear the world absolutely can do horrible things to us, full stop.

What I want to contribute to the conversation is this, and Krish is a perfect example of this. We create an enormous amount of pain in our own lives when we divide our behavior from the truth of our emotional energy. For example, you basically have three engines in your brain that are constructing your life.

You have an engine of emotion, you have an engine of behavior, and you have an engine of thinking. So a lot of times, my engine of emotion will say, I feel exhausted. But then my engine of behavior says… Too bad that you’re exhausted, we’re going to overwork. Right. My engine of emotion says, you know what, I don’t really like what just happened here.

I really kind of want to speak up. I want to share something. What do I do? I keep my mouth shut. I’m getting to a point in my life where like I really want to start honoring my sacred no more. I want to just start holding my own boundaries. What do I do? I say yes. In all of those moments, I have divided myself from myself, and what I show myself, yes, unconsciously, but nonetheless, your brain is picking up on it, that the dangerous person in the room isn’t them.

The dangerous person in the room is me. And so until we’re willing to integrate the truth of our feeling with the truth of our behaving, we’re never going to be whole. And by not being whole, we’re going to feel, again, I always say there’s, people say emotions are so confusing. There’s an emotional math to our life.

When you’re feeling in one direction and behaving in the other, the result is feeling depleted, feeling exhausted, feeling hopeless, feeling like I wake up every morning and look around and think, well, this isn’t all that exciting.

Right. I feel like there’s momentum either way. Like the more that I have this, what ends up being negative self talk because I’m constantly overriding, right?

The pain. I’m going, no, suck it up. I’m tired, but you know, I’ll sleep when I die. Or the, you know, the hustle culture, which we hear about, which can be so toxic or no, I’m going to give them this thing that just this one time, I’m going to do this thing one more time. It feels like there’s a momentum there, which gets worse and worse and worse.

But it also seems that If I address that and go, okay, I’m tired, my body’s really telling me that I want rest, and I begin to honor that, like, I would think also that that momentum speeds very quickly and gives me confidence very quickly as well.

Very quickly. That’s a great point, Joe. You’re exactly right.

One of the most extreme ways that I’ve come to learn this is I do a lot of treatment with trauma, you know, so PTSD is kind of the classic sickness after trauma exposure. And the reason that I will sometimes talk about really extreme cases of trauma, so very extreme assaults or torture, I do a lot of work with combat veterans, is because If we can get people relief under the most extreme and excruciating conditions of human suffering, then there’s lessons for all of us to learn along the continuum.

And one of the things I think people are surprised to hear is that when we work with PTSD, so say someone had a combat trauma a long time ago, decades and decades and decades ago, what happens is like, People start, even though the trauma happened many, many years ago, people are avoiding all of these things in their life today.

So for example, they’re avoiding social interactions. They’re not going into public. They’re having conflicts with their spouse. I mean, it’s just, it goes on and on. PTSD is a very debilitating disorder. If people are willing to engage in the treatment, which is at the core, am I willing? To face painful feelings that I’ve been avoiding.

Horrifying. Horrifying. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. That’s kind of what the sort of categorical definition of trauma, but I always say when we have lived through a trauma, the trauma is over. What happens is our brain tricks us and because that That energy, that emotional energy is stored in our nervous system.

The brain, when it kind of touches that emotional energy, it feels like, Oh my God, it’s going to happen again. Oh my God, it’s going to happen again. So we have to work powerfully with our nervous systems and say, okay, we’re no longer in Afghanistan or we’re no longer in Iraq or we’re no longer a child.

And we really go into the trauma. We process the trauma in very painstaking detail.

Otherwise, what you’re saying is, if I keep looking away from it, if I keep trying to shelter it, that’s how I’m reliving it every day, over and over and over, is because I’m trying to shelter it. 100%.

Let me say this, and if I start to go to a field, you take me back to wherever you want to go for your listeners.

Yeah. The horror of trauma is not what it did to us, it’s what it does to us. Someone abused me back then, people always abuse me. My childhood was volatile back then, my life is out of control until I die. Do you see there’s a presentness of trauma that it’s not just about what happened to me back in the day, it’s that the future has also been corrupted.

This is why if I always say I’ve had a million lifetimes to live, I would live it on this altar of human pain and human power. We have to understand that what happened to us then does not Get the power and the right to rob us the rest of our lives and when you start to understand the brain There’s got you kind of have two brains and I’m sure people have heard this in various ways before You have this like reactive primitive brain.

No problem. I always say The brain is the most powerful machine you will ever own. Operate wisely. And I think a lot of us pay more attention to our cell phones than our own nervous system. Yes? Yeah. So, okay, the program code is written that like the brain is going to be reactive and if you think about it, it treats all pain similarly.

In other words, that reactive part of the brain, if I put my hand on a hot stove, I’m going to pull my hand back. If I think about a trauma that happened to me. 20 years ago, if I haven’t worked through it, my brain’s gonna go, that’s bad, move away, move away. Just like I would pull my hand back from a hot stove.

It’s just how the machine operates. But thank God we have these higher functions of the brain, that especially when we engage with, in conversations like this, or with the right mental health professionals, we get to say, okay, let me think about this. Am I still reliving the trauma? No. Is it going to feel like I am reliving the trauma?

Yes. And actually, thank God, because it’s in reactivating the reason I called my book Energy Rising. Is because, what we want to do to get more powerful is when hard emotions come into our system, we have this reflex that says shove it down, shove it down, shut it down, avoid it, deny it, run from it, and we shove, shove, shove, shove.

Well, you do enough shoving for a long time and you end up… Emotionally constipated, brittle, suffocated, and weak. So the power move here is to say, let my brain and my body process these bad feelings so quite literally the energy can move and be released. Now, this all sounds lovely and theoretical, and I probably would be skeptical too if I haven’t been treating trauma for as long as I have.

I have seen people who are stuck with horrific PTSD for, I am not exaggerating, 40 years. address their untreated PTSD in 12 weeks.

Wow. Yes. And the thing I’m thinking is that’s a very extreme example, but we have this on a smaller level. Every single day, I mean, you write about these pain avoidances that we all have every day and I’m just going to take our stackers through three of them.

I think two of them I felt within the last two hours. You want to tell somebody what you’re really feeling, but you’re too afraid so you avoid it. And by the way, I realized also reading your work that Avoiding that discussion, that tough discussion is more exhausting than actually probably having the discussion.

I

just got chilled when you said that because you totally nailed it. Avoidance is not free. The idea of suppressing and holding an energy that naturally just wants to move through your system down and in. legitimately takes tremendous energy. Sorry, I interrupted you. I just got very excited. Well, I

had this actually happen about three weeks ago.

I get some coaching and, and my coach is a group called strategic coach. Our last quarterly meeting was about confidence and about building confidence. And I realized I was less confident about things going on in my organization. I thought, and I knew there were two difficult conversations I need to have.

And you talk about this and you’re in your work very succinctly that, you know, look at the pain and then think ahead to the actual pain that you’re actually causing. And you realize there’s this mountain of pain by not addressing it, that’s going to happen. So I used pain to get through the fact that I needed to have these conversations.

And so I had both these conversations and within a week, I was more confident than I’d been in probably three months. It was so, Amazing. But there’s that one. You’re really excited about launching a new product, but you’re embarrassed if nobody buys it. So you avoid it. I’m in the middle of something similar to that as well.

And by the way, mine is social media. I never want to, I’m really good at audio. We’ve been doing audio for a long time, but like you getting on social media, just scares the hell out of me. And every time I put the phone up to do it, I feel this huge self doubt. But you know what’s funny? I always feel better when I do it, and I feel worse when I don’t, like I’m letting myself down.

Third, you’re having trouble with one of your employees who keeps making mistakes, but you’re too frustrated to talk about it calmly. You’re afraid of how they might react to your criticism, so you avoid it. I mean, I check all those boxes. So these are not, quote, trauma, but man, they are, they are exhausting.

I want to end our time together. As you can tell, I’m super excited about everything we’re talking about, but you have at the end of every chapter, you have these exercises that we can do. And there’s one exercise from chapter two that I’d love to take everybody through. Cause I think this puts a point on the little piece of the book that we’ve been talking about, which is controlling your shake.

I love this idea of the shake because we all think of the shake as pain. And you point out that, well, yeah, kind of maybe in the short term, but the shake is really pretty badass. So can you talk about what the shake is and controlling our shake?

Absolutely. And thank God for physical health, because when I use the analogy, it becomes very clear for people.

So I call this idea is like, hold your emotional shake. So when I go to the gym and I try to get stronger, let’s say I can only lift 10 pounds. And today I’m going to like, Go big. I’m gonna go for 15 or 20. When I start to like lift, let’s go 20. I really start to get to like my third rep. My muscles are literally going to shake.

Okay. But never in the history of going to the gym have I ever seen anybody pass out, run from the gym screaming never to return again. In other words, even if the shake doesn’t feel that good, like in that exact moment, there’s something satisfying about it. Because it’s the shake that is the clearest evidence of your increasing strength, of your increasing power.

Well, the emotional system functions far, far more like the physical system than we give it credit for. So let’s imagine, Joe, I loved your example of social media, and it made me kind of chuckle, because, like, you have these, like, fear rating scales, and people are like, I would rather die than publicly speak, okay?

So, like, we, we are wired to be very, like, afraid. of all of these, like, these judgments that go on in our minds. So, let’s, let’s use your example. Say you’re going to do a Facebook Live and you’re going to show your beautiful face. Chances are very high that you’re literally going to shake. Your voice might shake, your hands might be shaky, your thoughts might race, your heart might pound.

But when it comes to our emotional lives, if we don’t understand what’s happening, we’ll shut that down. Oh god, Facebook is never for me. Oh, it’s not for you? How many times have you gone on Facebook Live? One time. One time. For 17 hours straight? No, for 7 seconds and I just determined it was never for me.

Well, the whole idea is we know that the brain habituates. Just like your muscles kind of rise to a greater level of power, if you just give your nervous system a little bit of time, I 100 percent promise you, it will habituate to a new baseline. It will happen if you do it regularly for a very short period of time.

It will happen. And I also love how you said, when you do the thing that you’ve been like avoiding, you get this great sense of relief and spaciousness, because now, finally, going back to what I was saying about these engines in your brain, your emotional engine, your behaving engine, and your thinking engine are all firing in alignment.

And that’s a beautiful, powerful place to

be. I get this big happiness surge. I don’t know which, you would know what it is, the chemical that’s hitting me, but endorphins, dopamine, I don’t know what the hell it is, but I get this great, wow, I lived through that. It was fantastic.

It’s true. And then the more you do it, you know, one thing people will sometimes ask me is like, Does fear go away?

And I say, well, if you got super good at, I don’t know, running, would your lungs stop breathing? No. Just like your lungs are here to breathe, your brain’s number one function is survival. And so the fear circuitry in the brain is always going to detect fear. But here’s the cooler thing. When you train yourself to handle more of an emotional load, To handle just a little bit more emotional weight, and a little bit more emotional weight, and a little bit more emotional weight, what’s gonna happen is, sure, you’re still gonna feel fear from time to time, but the rooms that you show up in…

are going to be a lot more powerful. The conversations that you’re now a part of are going to be a lot more powerful. The way that you’re expressing yourself is going to be a lot more like, when I say powerful I mean satisfying and enlivening. So it’s like, we just need to understand how to operate our brain.

And I think that’s really why I wrote Energy Rising was to show people through these eight codes, how to really work with the brain and the nervous system. I think it’s

fascinating to see how the brain’s working behind the scenes because it just goes with, you know, so many successful people we’ve talked to who have said.

I get afraid when I don’t feel the fear when I don’t feel like that. I know something bad’s going to happen. Like if I go out on a stage and I don’t feel nervous, I’m about to suck. It is, it is not going to go well. But when you talk to super successful people, it’s almost like they’re working the opposite.

Well, the same thing for investors, right? The, the stock market goes down. Everybody feels this fear. The professional investor goes, this is the time. This is the time when historically I’ve looked in the face of fear and I’ve made some better decisions. I’ve either held on, right? Or I found a way to see if there might be an opportunity here in

the fear.

That’s a phenomenal example. It’s like, is that moment in time scary? Probably to everyone universally. Yes. But the professional investor has trained themselves. to work instead of like pulling their hand back from the hot stove, right? They’re able to stay with the situation in an, it’s the same situation for everyone on some level, but they’ve trained their emotional system to work more powerfully in the moment.

It is amazing. We just talked to professor Peter Atwater about a new project he has about confidence and how these two go just. absolutely together is amazing. The book is called Energy Rising, The Neuroscience Leading with Emotional Power. We talked through, guys, stuff that’s in the first two chapters.

This goes so much deeper. There’s so much more. It’s so exciting when you realize that that you’re going to have these emotions, but you can drive the bus. The book’s available yesterday everywhere, right?

Yes, it’s a very exciting time and I’m so excited. I hope that people pick up Energy Rising. I really think it’s an extraordinary way to work with your nervous system.

I think it’s

fabulous. Well, thanks for all the work you do, Dr. Diganji, and thanks for helping our stackers become better stewards of our emotions. I appreciate it.

I appreciate the work that you do, and thank you so much for having me, Joe. Hey, this is John in

Seattle, and when I’m not telling

terrible dad jokes to anyone who will listen, I’m stacking Benjamins.

Big thanks to Dr. Diganji for hanging out with us. Oh, gee, this is specifically why we want an investment policy statement, because I totally agree. If you see this wave of emotion coming, or you’re able to catch yourself. Right? You can put all of these plans in action and make it work for you. You can say, why am I feeling, you know, what’s, what’s going on?

Like she mentioned, but investment policy statement is meant for times when you’re really emotional. Well, you can think

through the, the not so fun things that might happen, kind of stress test everything and solve that problem in advance. The neat thing is, is that you don’t know whether or not this is reality or make believe when you kind of go through emotional type things.

And if you’ve already experienced it, if you have a memory of, Oh, I remember thinking about what happens if this bad thing happens, this is what I would do. Then you’re much more likely to be successful because you’ve got some experience to draw on it. It’s when you, you know, when you kind of start out having this sensation, this emotion for the first time and go, I don’t know what to do, but I got to do something.

Quite often the answer is no, I don’t have to do anything with this particular thing right now. I can. Right. This is, this is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, but you have to game plan that in advance. You can’t experience it for the first time and then expect to choose

right. I love the idea of just having a roadmap.

Oh, I’m feeling this way. This is what I do. It’s funny. That changed for me when I became a financial planner. was, you know, I used to think that of course the stock market goes down, we should take all our money out. And now, now my gut reaction, every time the money, the market goes down, my gut reaction has become opposite.

Double down. Buy, buy, buy. Because I’ve trained myself, you know, over time. that this is the emotional rollercoaster that we need.

So, you know, Joe, it made me think of something else listening to Dr. Daganji about what we were talking about earlier in the episode with the emotions we have about money. I wonder how many people are listening to us and have been listening to us for quite some time thinking, I’m going to figure this out for myself to get my stuff in order so that I feel like I’m in a position that I can go to a financial advisor.

Right. When in fact, if you’re sick, Back to the crazy long analogy OG talked about with the medical world, if, if you’re sick, you got to go see a doctor, like you need that expert to help you. And they’re going to help you put together a policy statement, right? So that then you can know how to get yourself better, both, you know, seeking their advice and on your own.

A

long time ago, I went to a church in Michigan where I know she’s now a political figure on the outskirts, but, uh, she. At the time, I didn’t know, you know, there was no politics around Marianne Williamson, and she just happened to be the head of the church. And the best, the best, the best sermon she ever gave Doug was when she said, you know what?

I’m going to hand this over to God right as soon as I get done it up. You know what I mean? Like, we’re like, Hey, hold on. I got this. I got this. And you just destroy it more. And you know what I mean? So when you said that, you’re like, Oh, I’m going to wait until I get this together. I’m going to, I’m, I’m too embarrassed because I got this problem.

I’m going to fix these problems. Then it’s almost like the person that, that, you know, calls into Dave Ramsey. and goes, Hey, I’ve got 6 million in my IRA. I make 400, 000 a year. We got our cars paid off. I’m just wondering, Dave, if there’s anything else you think we should do. Flex, you know, you know, scoreboard, right?

Exactly. Just didn’t. And you know, and the whole collective audience rolls their eyes like,

Oh, great. Hold on. I’m still stuck on this sermon. Did she drop the F

bomb at the left turn? She did not. That was my takeaway. No, no. Marianne Williamson did not do that. I want to go to that church. But she left Detroit.

moved out west and, you know, now she’s, she’s running for president. It’s a whole different world. But then she was just leading this church. And that, that sermon has stuck with me, that often we hand things over to the, and I still think about that today. I mean, not just in terms of God, I think about that just in terms of.

I’m going to wait on the pro until I look better. You know, I’m going to wait until I don’t feel like such an idiot. And that, but man, good point. Thanks again, uh, to Dr. Daganji for joining us. Uh, Doug will have links later on. And of course, we’re going to dive even deeper into these topics of emotions in our 201 newsletter, uh, stackybenjamins.

com slash 201. Hey, let’s throw out the Avon lifeline and tackle some of life’s most. Important questions. Why could I never get that? So it’s life’s something. It’s been what? Almost 1, 450 episodes that I can’t figure out. Your life’s most important questions. Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency put, Doug, what you value first.

uh, flu shot. Oh, right now. It’s that time of year. Go get your flu shot. I’m getting mine tonight. Go

get it. Uh, your loved ones in your time. Uh, that’s why with a flu shot, it’s why they may buy in quality term life insurance. Actually simple. Well, what a romantic evening. You, your loved one and a flu shot had to stack your Benjamins exactly what we’re doing.

Is it? Yes. Oh, gee, Doug is Doug’s very romantic with

his

lady friend. Hey, I got a great thing for you. Did you see, by the way, there was a video recently of a guy who, uh, the thing in, you know, Cheryl and I have been married for a long time, but you know what, what always drives me crazy drives a bunch of men crazy is when you agree to go out to dinner and then you say, where do you want to go?

And she says, well, nowhere you pick. And then I pick and she goes, yeah, I don’t want to go there. And then you pick another one and she goes, yeah, I don’t want to go there. And then you pick another one and you’re like, yeah, you don’t want to. Okay, why don’t you just tell me where you want to go? She’s like, I really don’t care.

Oh, apparently you do. But there’s a video and I didn’t, I didn’t capture it. So I can’t play it. And I don’t know if it would even be great, just audio only, but the woman gets in the car, the spouse gets in the car and the guy goes, Hey, I’m surprising you with dinner. Guess where we’re going. And she’s like, Oh, I don’t want to guess just because nope, we’re going to guess.

She goes, I don’t. Um, uh, Shake Shack. He’s like, Oh my God, we, we’ve been living together too long. Cause that’s exactly what I was thinking. That’s pretty funny. She’s like, you are so romantic. You just know exactly where I want to go. He’s like, yes I do. Yes I do. So good. Anyway, uh, was I talking about Haven life?

I was, their application is simple. It’s online. You get an instant coverage decision. Prices are affordable. You get your life stackingbenjamins. com. Haven Life. Let’s, uh, say hi to Mark because we love Mark. Hey, Mark.

Hey, guys,

it’s Mark in Chicago. I just wanted to call Joe OG in, uh, in What’s His Face to run a target date fund strategy by OG to see if I could convince him.

that this is well thought out.

Okay. Hold on, Mark. I’m going to cut you off right there. Target date fund by OG. This is not going to end well. You ever watch those videos of where, you know, the car wreck is coming or, or better yet, the, uh, semi that’s going to go through the tunnel and you know, it’s too tall.

Right. Mark, I am guessing right now, this semi is too tall. And

if we had a soundtrack, the music would start and it would be like that ominous music, like, and then it would be like low and building. And then the monster OG comes out of the cave. Right. That’s what’s about to happen, Mark.

All right. I’m going to start, uh, Mark, I’m gonna start this over again.

Steve, if you can play the ominous, uh, music, uh, behind this. That would be, that would be fantastic. Cause, uh, well, this is great. All right. Uh, hello, Mark.

Hey guys, it’s Mark in Chicago. I just wanted to call Joe OG in, uh, in What’s His Face to run a target date fund strategy by OG to see if I could convince him that this is well thought out.

No! So I know one of your critiques is that target date funds are too conservative, too early. So what if I push my fund date out 10 or 15 years past my retirement date to stay in equities longer? Also, I know that target date funds are too heavily weighted in large and growth. So what if I added like 20 percent small cap value?

And finally, I know you need that last double, and that’s a big concern, so what if in ten years I ladder a second target date fund again to stay in equities longer to try to grab that last double? I’m wondering your thoughts on this, and boy, please dig deep in that t shirt pile, see if you have any 3x.

Thanks, men.

Oh god,

the ground is shaking because he’s taking these big giant monster steps towards the microphone.

So, let me just make sure I heard what he said. I want to buy a target date fund, then buy all the stuff that I should have bought outside of the target date fund, outside of the target date fund, then change the target date fund so that it’s not really a target date fund anymore, it’s just a fund that’s got a different date on it.

Then right before I need my fund, I’m going to buy a different target date fund. Is that, is that what I heard?

Yeah. I mean, it makes total sense. Works. Do it. Do

it. Sounds amazing. I mean, for all that work, why don’t you just take it apart? And that was my thought. And just do it the way

you want to do it. Oh gee.

I’m like, it’s not that it won’t work. It’s like, if health, you’re going through all that trouble, why don’t you just do it the right way? Because I feel like the right way it’s less work.

There’s a great piece that Paul Merriman puts out every single year sometime around the beginning of the year. And you can look it up and, um, I’m sure Kevin can find it and put it on the newsletter, but, but basically he updates his three fund portfolio, which is a very simple way to invest over 50 years.

And then updates the data and says like, okay, if you would have had this three year, this three fund portfolio, rebalanced it annually, started with a hundred K in 1970, and today it would be worth this. If you would just take, instead of having these funds, you would add just this little bit of international, then it would be this.

But, if you would just add a little bit of small cap, it would be this. But, if you added just a little bit of emerging market, it would be this. But, if you added a little bit of large cap value, companies have been around a long time, it would be worth this. And he goes through this exercise. So it changes this, this three fund portfolio to, uh, I don’t know, eight or nine, 10 fund portfolio, but not a lot.

And the difference in the portfolio, I’m going to butcher the numbers because I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s something like 10 million or 22 million. It’s a profound difference by adding those areas, those other asset classes that have higher expected returns over long periods of time.

The thing about investing is, is that it never works out in the manner in which you want it to work out. It never is the exact timing. We’re big believers in academic and science around investing. And I hear people all the time say, I had a client email me this and say, I don’t think we’re invested enough in AI.

And I said, what are you talking about? You have 14, 000 different stocks in your portfolio spread across these nine positions. I assure you there’s AI stocks. Oh, yeah, we should probably overweight it because you know, this is the new thing and i’m thinking to myself This is what people were arguing about in 2000 and in 1990 and 1980 and 19 said like there’s always the new thing And by investing in diversified ETFs, diversified mutual funds, you’re already capturing all of that stuff in a manner that is commensurate with their output relative to the global economy.

You’ve already got Microsoft, you’ve already got Google, who have monster AI programs.

Otherwise, you’re just guessing, right? You’re intervening, you’re putting your emotion, ah, ah, see what I did there? You’re putting your personal feelings in the way of the investing process. No different than anybody who says, Oh, the market’s down, I should take some money out.

That’s the, that’s the same, it’s the same sin, just a different, you know, see, I got that, church, emotion, I’m tying it all together. I don’t know if you guys are keeping notes at home. It’s just amazing. My point is, is that it’s the same argument. It’s just a different thing. It’s like, well, no, I think, I think, you know, this it’s why should the world care what you think?

You know, like, well, I read online that, why should the world care that your little echo chamber of AI people think this? The reality is, is that if it’s a, if it’s a, an investment in an industry or a sector, whatever you want to call it, that is productive, capital will find its way there automatically. And by being diversified, by, by owning an S& P fund, by owning a small cap fund, by owning these things, you will partake in that growth merely by investing in those big, broad asset classes.

And so, I don’t understand why you would purposefully try to take money off the table when it’s not that much more difficult to add those extra layers in there. Like Merriman says, you know, every year. So yeah, target date funds are fine. It will get you where you probably want to go. And if all of your energy is committed elsewhere and you go, I have to invest some money.

I don’t know where to put it. I don’t have the time or energy to pick something, pick the longest date target date fund you can find and put all your money into it. But the solution to your longterm plans is not going to be I picked this target date for under that, or I diversified this for that. It’s not going to be those things.

It’s always going to be, did I save enough money? So we’re talking about the top of the pyramid here, you know, that sort of stuff.

Mark, um, I’m very glad you called because your question, this is why we send people, uh, t shirts when they call. Mark’s question. Mark’s not alone here, OG. I mean,

17, 000 other people who want to ask

the same question.

So many people don’t, because that would be a lot of t shirts.

I’m so happy you called, because this is a monster problem. And it’s why, frankly, we had Dr. Digenji on today. It’s because it’s such a problem. It’s such a, such a thing for people. And, um, and I think where you are, man, I feel like you’re far enough along this route.

If you’re thinking that critically about your investments, then I think using something like the Efficient Frontier or more scientific portfolio is exactly where you want to go. So no need to layer products that aren’t meant for that. And to second guess the target date fund people by putting, use OG’s terms, you know, target date fund on top of target date fund.

I think there’s a, there’s a much easier route. That’s going to be also more gratifying. So great, great stuff. Thanks for that question. If you’ve got a question for us, stackyourbenjamins. com slash voicemail, and we’ll send you a Haven Lifeline Stack Your Benjamins greatest money show on earth t shirt for, uh, for calling in with a question that everybody else has.

So many people have that question. Hey, uh, time for our last segment of the day. Uh, this is our community corner. We call it the back porch. It’s the last segment of the show. Little new. So today versus on Monday, back porch, I like that. I like sitting out on the back porch and chatting at the end of a good episode.

Yeah, I have a little factoid for you, Joe. Doug already heard this, but I’m going to ask you. A couple weeks ago, iPhone 15 launched. I don’t know if you were interested in getting a new iPhone or not. Question number one, when was the first iPhone launched? Any idea? Wait here.

We just did this.

2008. Close.
2009. Okay. 2007. And the purchase price for said iPhone when it first

came out was? Oh, it was a bunch of money. It was like 400

bucks. Yeah, pretty close. 399 as a matter of fact. All right. So here’s the question. Had you, I’m sorry, 499. If you would have, instead of buying an iPhone, put the money in Apple

stock.

How many iPhones could

you buy now? Yeah, that would have been the trivia question. How many iPhones could you have purchased? Because it’s like multiple layers. But how much money would you have today if on launch day in 07, you took the 499 instead of buying an iPhone one? You put it in Apple stock. How much money do you have today?

500 bucks. Uh, let’s say two grand.

35, 000. Yes. And we could do this every year. Last year, the iPhone 14 came out 2022. Obviously iPhone 14 was 799. If you would have put your 799 in Apple stock, instead you’d have 950 today. So, you know, uh, so I think I’m pretty close here. The first four years of iPhones were 499, 599, 599, 599.

Those were the prices for the models. If instead of buying an iPhone each one of those years, instead you would have just on those dates, put 499, 599 in Apple stock, you’d have 100, 000 today. That’s incredible. Um, the moral of the story obviously is today I bought two iPhones.

I see where you’re going there. Next. So I avoided all that

data. Yes. Yes. So I was like, well, should’ve done that 15 years ago. Right. Oh well. Oh

geez. Oh geez. Like reversion to the mean. Here’s my 1600 bucks. And

I need two new ones.

Uh, uh, that’s, that’s incredible. Also incredible as a result of a poll, uh, Doug, from a headline that we did.

The greatest poll

we may ever do.

We, we had a discussion where the CEO of Amazon said, Hey, come back to the office at least part time. A bunch of people go, no, I’m not doing that. I said, going back to the office is a good thing for your career. Doug is like, that’s a bunch of crap. So we asked our Spotify audience and Doug, what did the audience have to say?

So this

was a great poll. This is maybe the best poll we’ll ever do. I know in my opinion, we should probably never do another poll

again. God, you know, the end of this.

We’ll still do more polls because they’re fun, but this, this sparked, uh, this topic sparked a lot of great conversation in the basement.

It’s still going on. There’s, there’s still people commenting on this topic in the basement from a post that happened a while ago. And then we did this poll, uh, on Spotify. So the poll question was simply work remote or at the office. Who is right on? And, uh, Well, Joe, you know, he did fine, I suppose, uh, about as well as he could be expected to do with his point of view on this, uh, With his limited brain

capacity is what he’s trying to do.

You know, Joe advanced in age, can’t really think for himself. Joe got

25 percent of the vote, but, Give me the golf clap. Yours truly, neighbor Doug got 75%.

To be fair, that’s not the question though. The question was, which one’s going to help your career more? Not, which, not, let’s survey people who work from home.

Would you rather go to the office or work from home? Well, of course, 80 percent of people are going to say they’d rather work from home. Well, here’s

the other thing about that, OG. I think, I think people want Doug to be right. I do. I think people want Doug to be right.

Yeah. Yeah. A little bias. I just think selection bias,

obviously.

I still think proximity matters. I think it does matter. I don’t think it’s just me. I don’t think it’s, it’s who I am around.

We got some great comments from people like Micah in the basement. Micah says, companies can build culture around remote workers. You just have to be intentional. Oh, by the way, Micah, companies have to be intentional about their culture regardless if people are in the office or out of the office.

You, you have to be intentional if you want a specific culture. You just have to do it a little bit differently and with some different methods if they’re remote. So I’m agreeing with you, Micah, and most importantly, Micah’s agreeing with me, Joe. And then Eric Berryman, uh, is similar. He says, I’m in Doug’s camp, and this speaks directly to if you want to get ahead in your career, but.

OG and Joe have small company view of things, and he goes on to talk about what you’re focused on if you’re working at a company like Amazon with 100, 000 plus people. You absolutely can get ahead, as I talked about in that episode before. I didn’t say you

couldn’t get ahead. You said, but

it was better.

You’re trying to say it’s

better. I do think proximity is better. And yet in the

example that I talked about where I had a lot of hard metric data to support it, the, all of the, the majority of the people the fast track for senior executive positions at that health insurance company I used to work for were

remote.

I think Mike had nailed it though. You got to be intentional because you know, we’re a remote organization, eight people around the United States. And I do feel like we’re. I feel like we’re like, we just got out of a meeting and I feel like we were face to face. You know what I mean? Because we’re so used to being online.

So you were face to

face. Cause we are literally face to face. My face is like eight inches away from yours right now. All

right. Whatever.

And I don’t have to smell your breath. It’s the best

of both worlds. All right. I think that’s going to do it for today. By the way, coming up tomorrow, Kate the Great from our team leading an Instagram live.

That’s 5 p. m. Eastern, 2 p. m. Pacific, if my math is correct. 2 p. m. Specific. Specific. Pacific. Specific. Yeah, Specific Pacific. Uh, 2 p. m. make sure to say hi to Kate and, uh, we’re going to talk about the topics we talk about here. There, if you want to look at all the places where you can hang out with, uh, our team, stackingbenjamins.

com slash welcome. That’s going to put a pin on today. On Friday, we’ve got a round table episode, which is a little bit different. We hang out and we talk about. Some big topic that’s been in the financial media and our new friend, Elaine King joins us on Friday. Financial planner, who was a top 10 Investopedia advisor on the same list that OG was on.

Did OG fall off the list? No, he was on the list. He was there. Nice. Yep. OG was on it. Elaine King was on it. Um, Stephanie McConnell, who, OG you just hung out with recently. and who was recently on the show, was on it, and, uh, quite a few

guests from We had a little reception in, uh, Huntington Beach.

SB, uh, Stephanie, she’s so cool.

Very cool, yeah. But, Elaine King is also, she’s never been on the show and it’s about time. But anyway, Doug, that’s going to do it for today. What should we have learned today? Well, Joe,

first, take some advice from Dr. Daganji and learn to recognize your stress triggers so you can get a hold of your emotions before they get a hold of you.

Second, seeking financial advice? Remember, sometimes it pays to find people to help you not make a decision. I wish someone would do that with me and doughnuts, but the big lesson… Before you offer to help someone move, make sure it’s just their home and not a country’s entire capital. I wonder if George Washington had to offer to buy Ben Franklin and James Madison pizza and beer to get him to help out.

Thanks

DeGangi for joining us today. You can find out more about her book, Energy Rising, The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins. com. This show is the property of SB Podcasts, LLC, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul Sehy. Our producer is Karen Repine.

This show was written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast, with help from me. Joe, and Doc G from the Earn Invest podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called The 201. You’ll find the 411 on all things money at The 201.

Just visit stackingbenjamins. com slash 201. Wonder how beautiful we all are? Of course you’ll never know if you don’t check out our YouTube version of this show, Engineered by Tina Ichenberg. 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. Want to chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngkin are our social media coordinators and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. Say hello when you see us posting online.

To join all The Basement fun with other stackers type StackingBenjamins. com slash basement. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor.

I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins show.

So earlier, I got edited earlier. Our listeners don’t know this, but you cut me off because I was going on too long about my thing. Now we get to listen to OG’s emotional scarring about his trip to the doctor for 20 minutes.

And go ahead and take that out, Steve.

I know. I knew you were going to say that.