Trust. The foundation of modern society is built on it. Today we are fortunate to welcome Dr. Henry Cloud to the Basement to dive into who you can trust in life and who you can’t. Ever felt like your gut was telling you something about a person and that you shouldn’t trust them? Why do you get that feeling? How can knowing what trust signs to look for benefit you in business and life? Our friend Doc G from the Earn & Invest Podcast helps us out with the interview. You don’t want to miss this episode!
In our headline today, would you let your kid jump on his/her phone and go all or none on a sweet straddle on Apple Stock? We learn about a popular broker who’s in some regulatory hot water because of some clients who can’t (legally) buy alcohol. Plus, we throw out the Haven Lifeline to Stacker Sammy who asked a question about HSAs. Throw in some of Doug’s historical trivia, and we’ve got ourselves a podcast, boys and girls!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at StackingBenjamins.com/201.
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Trading app fined $3M for letting youngsters trade options spreads (Investment News)
Dr. Henry Cloud
Big thanks to Dr. Henry Cloud for joining us today. To learn more about Dr. Cloud, visit www.drcloud.com/about. Grab yourself a copy of the book Trust: Knowing When to Give It, When to Withhold It, How to Earn It, and How to Fix It When It Gets Broken.
Doug’s Trivia
- On today’s date in history, back in 1974, farmers in China were digging a well when they found a chamber filled with what monumental artifacts?
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.
- For those with an HSA, how to you keep track of HSA qualifying expenses?
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 insurances to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode Transcript:
Nervous. Yes. First time. No. I’ve been nervous lots of times.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and ever feel like you placed your trust in the wrong people. Yeah. That makes two of us today to help us trust better at work, home, and with our money. We welcome Dr. Henry Cloud in our headlines. Know what your children are doing while they’re playing on your phone, maybe making you a fortune.
We’ll share one brokerage company’s problem with kids. Plus we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to a lucky, Stacking Benjamins listener. And of course, we’ll wash it all down with some solid trivia. Wait, what? And now two guys who may or may not catch you in a trust fall. It’s Joe. Oh and oh.
What does that mean? May or May. Of course we will. Well, oh, we are your financial backstop peach.
Well, yeah. My L five begs to differ. Joe ,
have you seen the video
where they’re doing the trust fall and they’re like, okay, you just, they fall the wrong way and they fall forward. ?
Yeah. Everybody’s lined up behind totally face play.
Oh man. Hey everybody. Welcome to Wednesday on the Stacky Benjamin Show. I’m Joe’s Sea. Hi, average Joe Money on Twitter. Welcome to the show. That is your trust fall show when it comes to your money. And, uh, here with me, not only Doug who’s given me the stink eye right now for that awesome analogy. But Mr.
OGs here too. How are you man?
Yeah, I’m a lot more pleasant than Doug every day. So Doug can look at you side eyed all day, all day long.
Oh, well
it’s a great day. We’re talking about trust and, uh, nobody I trust more than you two. I, I’m trying not to laugh as I say that. , I’ve tried so hard. Yes, you need new friends.
So, so hard. Uh, Dr. Henry Cloud, talking about trust and certainly in the area of money we wanna be around people that we trust. Gotta trust our advisors, family members, people we work with. We’re gonna talk about who to trust, but before that, we got a headline that I think parents are really gonna be interested in.
So I think, I think it’s time to go, but something we should all be interested in. Og everybody, lean forward, lean closer to your vice because it’s time for. So amazing messages right there.
I’m just picturing people with headphones in actually leaning forward. Leaning forward. For no damn reason while they’re walking around the park.
It’s already in their head, but they’re leaning forward anyways because you
said, Harold, what the hell you doing? I told me to lean forward. Dr. Henry Cloud is here. So let’s get to the headline. 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, which is an industry website for uh, financial professionals.
This is written by Emil Halas trading app. Find 3 million. For this one, OG letting youngsters trade option havens. Does your youngest, does your youngest OG come out and go? Dad, I got this sweet straddle on Apple stock.
I did an iron condo haven afternoon in between my Roblox rounds, right? Eight 15 Hyundai.
I wish they would
while their kids were doing nap time. I was secretly on the phone doing put options.
Gotta sell those puts baby Powell’s talking today.
Somebody’s gotta make the money in this family. That’s right. Uh, stock trading app provider, Weibel Financial has been fined 3 million by FINRA for allegedly not properly vetting its customers.
Apparently when you don’t know your customer is young, uh, that might be a problem including more than get this 2,500 people, yes, younger than 21, who are allowed to trade option havens finra, which announced the fine a couple weeks ago, found that the company did not conduct adequate due diligence on customers between December, 2019, in July, 2021, according to an announcement from the self-regulatory organization.
Can you imagine that meeting at Weibel, by the way, about, Hey, uh, there’s a thinner investigation. What’s that about? It turns out we’re letting some 11 year olds trade options. This is not a problem og that people with older kids like mine or, or Doug yours that we would’ve experienced, but I think that parents with young kids home.
Now, I don’t know if this is better or worse than your kid. What, what about that kid that ordered all the Uber Eats? Yeah, a couple months ago. . Yeah. All of a sudden all this food starts showing up at the door. The pizza. A little bit of everything, wasn’t it? Yeah. I don’t, I mean,
it happened even during our kids.
I mean, I own a copy of, I’ve fully owned a digital copy of The Purge that I wanted nothing to do with because my kid bought it. Like the full editor or you know, directors
for $99. Yeah. .
I’m still a bit bitter about that. So even back in the day, it was possible for kids to do stupids. Was it a CD set? What was it?
No, it was like on demand going through, you know, Xfinity and decided I need to watch that right now. And didn’t realize he bought
it. Right. And then when he was a teenager, did he tell you that other thing he bought seven times digitally was an accident, didn’t
know what it was. Well, it was my brother.
That happened. That happened literally within an hour of him getting his first laptop. Did it really? Oh yes. Within an hour. Oh wow. He brought me in and he had viruses like you would not believe. . Yeah. He was going,
oh
my God. And then we’ll talk about his
computer. I had to reformat the whole Yeah. . Right.
So, yeah, I don’t, I mean thankfully, honestly it happened right away and I just reformatted the entire hard drive and reinstalled everything. Don’t let your mother know, you know, he learned his lesson
like this, this computer’s
great. . Yeah. Compared to those things, I think trading options would be a much better.
Yeah. Dad, I got, I got smoked in the option market today. Like your kids got like a graspy voice, like he smokes all day on the trading floor. , coming home from elementary school, you won’t believe what recess did to
me. Kids trading options. Og, I mean, seriously, besides the security issue, the fact that they might be using mom and dad’s money.
Is it bad that kids are learning about these, these tools at a young age and maybe, maybe at 15 they’ll lose a few hundred bucks right? On trading options and learn that they don’t wanna play that game earlier. I just like the fact that kids are interested in that. It, yeah. I mean, there, there was, I wasn’t thinking about options when I was in high school.
Well,
well, it wasn’t as much of a thing either. It just, I mean, they, they existed of course, but it really wasn’t the prevalence that it is today. Um, this could also be, you could also say this for like online gambling, right? Like that’s kind of, yeah. I don’t know how many states have it now. Half of ’em or more probably where, you know, you grab your phone and you flip it open and go, ah, you know, I’m gonna bet that Jordan SPE makes this putt.
Boom. I’m either right or wrong, I get the. Gratification of, of winning or losing. I’m not
a part of that culture at all. And we went
over to, yeah, I mean, well not in Texas is a state that doesn’t
have it. Well, we went over to people’s house for the Super Bowl that I haven’t hung out with in a long time.
And immediately at this party, there’s maybe 25 people there. I’m stating with this group alike, six guys. And just before kickoff, everybody’s jumping on their phone. To, to bet on the coin flip. Yeah. Like everybody’s jumping on their foot. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve never done DraftKings like, and these guys, these guys are doing it six times during one game.
Like they do it all the time.
Yeah. Yeah. And if you allow notifications, DraftKings completely plays into your weaknesses. And I’ll be like, there’s a cricket match going on in Bermuda right now. Do you wanna bet on that? Oh hell, I got a 50 50 shot at it. Why not , follow
by, follow by. If you have a gambling problem, please call
Right, exactly. Yeah. We’re gonna, we’re gonna completely entice you with all these bells and whistles and fun
stuff. 2:00 AM you’re going like crazy. Ding, but ding. Uh, but that’s, you know, that’s no different than, I remember when PayPal came out with multiple currency options where you could get paid in dollars or pounds or euros or yen or whatever, and I was like, huh.
There’s probably an opportunity there. I mean, my first PayPal account, I, I only opened it so that I could. arbitrage the currency
or he’s all sent into four x trading.
Exactly. I don’t think I was successful, but it was interesting.
Well then maybe that’s the question, OG is this are, are these kids you think are, is this just gambling?
Are these kids gambling? I mean, this may not even be about investing. This is just, well, hey, I’m in high school.
Concentrating is a gamble. It’s not an investment. It’s like literally a binary outcome. You will either be successful or not, you will make money or zero. There is no, there’s not like, well I’m, you know, I’ve invested money down 4%.
No, it’s all gone. Or you earn it, unlike your Apple stock purchase where at the end of the day, regardless of what happens to Apple that day, you still own the position in an option trade. You could own zero or you could owe a boatload of money. I think, I think the greater risk is understanding what that downside potential is, and I don’t think everybody understands that two sides of options have unlimited downside.
Which
is, uh, well, and that’s the other thing too. If Weibo is letting these kids trade options, then that assumes probably that there’s a margin account, right? Yeah. So these are people that are underage that have been able to borrow money from Weibo or whoever their, their Yeah. Institution is, that’s the
partner.
Well, and remember that story from a couple years ago about the Robinhood account where the kid got over margin and it was inaccurate, and, and then he committed suicide, committed suicide, um, because he didn’t know how to face to face his folks to tell him that he owed $700,000 of margin. And then of course, Robin Hood was like, oh, sorry, that was a bad reporting.
That, that, that wasn’t the right number. There’s some risk there.
I agree that this is weed bull’s responsibility, but for parents out there, og, I mean, how do we, how, how do you police that with your. It’s difficult.
Yeah. I’m not sure that there’s a way to stop them from option trading other than to, you know, give ’em something better to do.
Like, like Doug’s kid , like point ’em in that direction. Like, yeah, your phone is to be used for these things only like homework, watching videos. It’s an education thing and making sure that you’re open and honest on Monday. Uh, we talked about how people aren’t always open with money, and if that’s part of the discussion that’s going on in your household, then you might get a question at the dinner table of like, what’s a collar haven and why would I want to use it?
Dad , you’re like, like a haven collar, like a, like a shirt? Like No, no, no. I read about it online. It’s like next to an iron condor. Like that seems like a bird. That would never Oh, you’re talking about option trades. Oh.
Dad theoretically, if like the bills were playing the chiefs, do you think they’d score more or less than 46 points
Exactly. Just hypothetically.
Dad, they were playing each other. Who’s gonna win? Oh, definitely the bills. Okay. Yeah. But would they win by a lot or, yeah. Would it be a close game? Like say within, how do you get half a point in football? That’s really my question. And then like,
what’s this coin toss thing at the beginning?
right. How often does it come up?
Tails? Yeah. Is there any background on that that we could check out? Maybe some history on the coin toss. I would like
to drop my English class and take gambling probabilities.
Yeah. All of a sudden your kid’s very interested in statistics. Statistics. He’s like, I’m
taking the AP stats course
might not be good in theory economics.
It is true though. Oh gee. This is another reason we need to just open up these money conversations. Yeah. Before your kid gets into big trouble. , you wanna be on top of that. We will, of course, link to this and a deeper discussion into this topic and money discussions with your children on our newsletter.
The 2 0 1 Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 comes out the day after our Monday, Wednesday shows always free and, uh, unsubscribe at any time. Although, man, I think you’re gonna love digging into all of these. Why
did we tell everybody unsubscribe at
any time? Because I don’t like signing up for crap that I can’t unsubscribe.
I, I actually got on a mailing list Doug last week that included text messages. I could not, I, I tried stop. I tried unsubscribe. I wrote to them. I just had to block the number, and then they came at me from a different number and it drove me crazy. So, I, I just want to be clear. If you don’t want, I don’t wanna send people emails that they don’t want.
Let’s not do it. But our open rate, average, open rate of, of newsletters in America, I think is 12%. We have a 50% open rate on, on these 2 0 1 newsletters. So the people who sign
up for it and they’re like, sweet. Another email, another,
yeah. You had a friend, you had a friend tell you this, text you and tell you how much you like the 2 0 1.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It was, uh, an old, old friend of mine who, uh, I’ve mentioned before on the show who eats some of the most bizarre crap you could ever imagine, but he
doesn’t like Girl Scout cookies,
but . Yeah. And uh, uh, he started listening and then he signed up for the newsletter and he sent an incredibly flowery, nice complimentary
review.
A good friend of mine said, Hey, Joe, I don’t listen to podcast a lot, but I try to catch yours. He. But I read every 2 0 1 that comes . I’m like, I don’t know if that’s a compliment or your voice can’t stand the sound of your voice ,
but that Kevin Bailey sure can write .
He’s amazing. Just send me more of that guy.
Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 to get our newsletter. Hey, coming up next, Dr. Henry Cloud is an acclaimed leadership expert, clinical psychologist in New York Times bestselling author, his listen to this Flex Guys 45 books. Oh, come on. 45. Yeah. What does he do in his spare time, including the iconic boundaries, have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide.
Of course, he’s coached executives all over the planet, and of course he’s here today coaching us on trust. And when our trust gets broken, how do we rebound from it? When do we withhold trust? When do we know it’s a good time to give trust a great topic. I think when we’re talking about our money in our life.
Interviewing him today. Our good friend from our sister show, doc G from the Earnin Invest podcast. Gonna be talking to Dr. Cloud and we’ll talk to him for a few minutes, uh, breaking down the interview right at the end. But as a lead in, uh, Doug, today was a big day in history for some farmers. Huh?
Hey there, trivia warriors. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and I’m glad we’re digging into trust today with Dr. Cloud because I’m sick of everyone wanting to borrow my sweet El Camino, not giving anyone the keys to her. No way. Last time someone borrowed her, no names, but the initials rhyme With og, my fuzzy dice went missing and now I see ’em hanging from someone’s again.
No names. Microphone stand. Nope. Never happening again. Well, at least I can trust one thing. This crazy calendar, Joe’s mom got me. It says, today’s a big day in history. A day where they found something way more valuable than the $10 I found in my pocket last Tuesday. Farmers near Shean China back in 1974 found a whole army of Benjamins worth of what?
Huge treasure under their field. I’ll be back right after I put a trail camera on my car. I saw the way that one guy was oogling, my pine tree air freshener. No one’s getting close to my baby. Ot, nobody.
Hey, there are stackers. I’m trivial wheeler and big time Indiana Jones fan. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. You know, I thought I struck gold when Joe’s mom accidentally filled the El Camino with premium gas and bought eggs on the same trip. But check out today’s trivia question on today’s date in history.
Back in 1974, farmers in China were digging a well when they found a chamber filled with what monumental artifacts, the farmers found a huge vault which had been buried with Emperor Chin Chiang way back in two 10, b c e, to protect him in the afterlife. What was protecting him? An army of terracotta soldier.
And now a guy bringing us a wealth of knowledge. Teaching us when to give withhold and earn trust is Dr. Henry Cloud and our good friend, doc G,
Dr. Henry Cloud, author of Trust, knowing when to give it, when to withhold it, how to earn it, and how to fix it when it gets broken. Welcome to Joe’s Mom’s basement. We’re so happy to have you with
us today. Well, Dr. Jordan, it is a pleasure to be here. Love what you guys do. So I wanna
start by getting a touch personal.
We’re gonna talk about trust in the business place, in the world in general, in relationships, but let’s talk about your life. Tell me about a time in your life where someone broke your trust and the impact it had.
Oh gosh. You know, I can point to more than enough than you need to write a book about it.
Hopefully the book’s more about the science, the business aspects about trust works. But yeah, we’ve all had our train wrecks. Right. But I’ll give you one. Um, I think that a lot of your audience can relate to. Years ago I had started a company that grew to pretty big, sizable enterprise. I didn’t have any money when I started it, and so I had to go find the money and raise the money and bring, bring some expertise on that I, I couldn’t really afford.
And so I, one of the people I brought on, I gave him a sizable chunk of stop. It went really, really well. We were doing great. And then I had partners who. Owned 40 ish, 40 something percent of it, and they decided to sell their company. So they sold their company, which owned little less than half fun. And the guy that I brought in and gave the stock to who was a friend, they went behind my back to him and offered him a big, big, big, big check.
And he didn’t come to me once and didn’t say anything, and he sold it to them. And all of a sudden, the company that I started from, nothing I had lost control of. That was a big, big breach of trust. One of the things I think that I’ve learned over the years is that it’s really helpful if we have some sort of an algorithm, you know, that we can operate by kind of a diagnostic tree, if you will, to think about in this particular context.
For these particular reasons, why do I hit the go button on trust with this person? Because trust, you know, it’s not a toggle switch. Even though we experience it that way. Sort of like we get a feel and we lean in to trust someone. But there’s been a lot of determinants that have happened to get us to that, that point.
And sometimes we have false positives, you know, we can trust somebody, but we hadn’t really checked the boxes. We need to check for that context.
I wanna talk about those check boxes in a few minutes. But before we get there, I mean, you’re the guy who wrote the book on trust and yet in a sense, you have this happen to you in business.
Is the average person good at knowing who and when to trust research ? That was research. So is the average, is the average person good at knowing who and when to trust?
Well, if we’re looking at a bell curve, you gotta get pretty far. Probably past average to get really good at it, or we wouldn’t have as many broker relationships and failed business partnerships and, and all of that that we have.
So if you go average, I think we can all, all get better at it. But here’s the problem. We are wired to trust. I mean, biologically, neurologically, psychologically, we’re wired to trust because everything in life depends on trust, everything. I mean, we’ve been sitting here for the last minute, all of us, the people that are, are joining us as well, and you’ve been breathing well.
The r reason is your entire system all the way down your spinal cord and your gut and your old factory system is, is working to answer one question. Am I safe? And it’s determined that the air’s okay to breathe. Now if a fume came in or the temperature got to a certain place or you’d sniff something before it gets to consciousness, your body is kind of moved back.
So whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s that smell? I don’t know if I can breathe this air or not. So we’re all wired to do this or a baby could never grow into a child if they couldn’t trust and when they, when they can’t, we have to stimulate, you know, the infant to, to start to take in attachment, to take in food, we have to have trust.
You’ll never scale a business or a career of can’t trust cuz you’ll be doing everything by definition. So here’s the problem, we’re wired to trust. We do it automatically in one sense, but we learn patterns. and so we learn patterns positively and negatively. You know, when you say the average, first of all?
Well, if we grow up in our early relational patterns and wiring and all of that kind of teaches us, wow, when I smell this air, I do well. When I smell this air, it hurts. Then we get wired to be able to kind of recognize the good guys in the background. But then a lot of times things go wrong with our trust muscle as well, and you get wounded early in life, you don’t trust enough, or you get maybe gaslighted by an narcissistic primary relationship and you’re blinded to certain kinds of people, or you just don’t have good enough boundaries to say no when something smells funny.
There’s a lot of ways that we get into trouble and, and one of the big problems is when we get into a state of need. Then our vision can really get screwed. I’ve seen companies, a key player will leave or retire or something and we gotta find somebody. We gotta feel this and, and then if you haven’t had a date in five years, anybody looks good.
So need affects it. There’s a lot of things in effect.
So Dr. Cloud, what we were talking about is this idea that, you know, in your personal life and in our business lives, in almost everything we do, we have to be a little bit careful of how we trust so that we don’t get burned. On the other hand, you also talk about the need and a trusting relationship for carelessness.
Help me understand that dichotomy.
Well, carelessness, you know, if you’re looking at a train, it’s sort of the caboose, it’s kind of the fruit of trust working. Well, like right now, you are not worried about your microphone. You’ve been focusing on our conversation. You’re not sitting there having a. Take care of it, hoping that thing doesn’t fall off or whatever.
You got, you know, all your money in the back. You’re not obsessing about, oh my gosh, did they lock the doors last night? Did they just, did they steal it? You’re careless in the minute. You’re not having to guard yourself. You’re not having to take care of something that you’ve entrusted it somebody else, which is why trust is the fuel that scales everything in life.
You have a lot of listeners that, you know, they run businesses or own businesses or run a department or whatever. If you’re gonna scale this thing and you want somebody to go acquire another company or go open up another region or something, you’ve got to be able to send them. And trust them and know they’re gonna pull it off so you can focus on what you gotta do.
And if you, if that thing really grows, you are gonna be doing more trusting than you ever imagined. And so you don’t wanna be lying awake at night worrying about something, taking care. You wanna be careless enough that you can trust him. But please don’t be careless in the beginning. It’s not the engine, it’s the caboose.
So the goal is to get to this carelessness. You had mentioned before this idea that there were some check boxes, right? Tactically there’s some things we can do to start trying to better understand if this is going to be a trusting relationship. Talk about the A five essentials of trust.
All right, well it all begins and, and you being a position, you understand this, that we are literally biologically and neurologically wired.
To lean into and to trust in our system. Open up to someone when we, you know, you’ve heard friend or foe someone. When we through mirror neurons, when we get the feeling that they are focused on me and understand me, to me it basically comes down to, and I hate to sound like the shriek, oversimplifying things, but this is brain science.
It comes down to, to listening. It basically comes down to deep listening. And when somebody feels, you know, if you’ve got a customer for example, and they really feel like you have really listened to their needs and you understand what’s important to them, you understand what they’re afraid of, you understand what hurts them.
You understand why this thing can’t break or whatever it is. They start to not. Because they feel, oh, he gets me. He knows what we need. Or you get a vendor, they really understand our business and they understand. When they begin to feel that, then they’re starting to, starting to open up. I was talking about this in a leadership event one time, and guy walks up to me and said, yeah, I’m the lead hostage negotiator for the fbi, and everything you just talked about is our training program.
But see people in business and the rest of life, anybody that’s a go-getter, you know, we kind of want to go in and talk somebody in to trust us, right? Oh, this is a good deal. You won’t believe that, and we’re gonna persuade ’em first. You’re not gonna persuade somebody who’s not listening to you and they don’t listen to you until they feel like you’ve listened to them.
So that’s number one. You know, talked about, I had a couple knee replacements in last year. I went into one surgeon and he looks at the X-ray. Oh yeah. I, I, I, I understand what’s going on. You got, you need a total knee replacement and watch you schedule it and kinda walked out the door. I mean, literally, I stopped and I said, wait a minute.
All you’re gonna do is look at an x-ray and amputate my leg. I mean, where he, I didn’t feel like he listened to me at all. And so I, I would see another surgeon he starts with, so tell me about the pain. I looked at your x-ray, man, this thing, you must be hurting. Tell me when did it start? How does it affect you?
And started to really kind of, uh, and I’m feeling myself, oh, I like this guy better cuz it felt like I existed. So somebody understands this. Right? Well, that’s number one. I think. Let’s go back to the knee surgeon. Uh, I interviewed three of them and one of ’em really understood me. But then he goes, he yells out there, Hey, bring, bring, bring him.
You know, he is. All of a sudden, his team of residents come in. And it’s in a, a big, one of the big training hospitals. And he goes, now come here. Look, this is exactly what we’re talking about in that paper, and you know, we’re gonna get the stats on this and I think we can use it. And all of a sudden I’m realizing the second one, his motives, look, I don’t mind people, we all have self-interest.
We need to have self-interest in any dealer in life. But it felt like it was all about his interest and not mine. His motive for being there was, I was gonna be a hamster in his project, not somebody that he was also interested in. Maybe, oh, I needed this thing to turn out . And so we look at somebody’s motives and you’ll be able to tell, it’s basically about what’s their agenda.
I mean, if you’ve ever been on a board, the organization, the company has a mission, but you get a board member and they’ve got their own agenda that they’re driving. Instead of their motive being, how do we serve the whole and the whole thing, or even on a team or even in a marriage, if one person, if it’s all about them and what they want, it just doesn’t, it’s basic self-centeredness.
So we gotta, they’ve gotta be able to check the box of they’re not only interested in themselves, but they really want good for me, they are for me. They want to make sure I’m okay. Back to carelessness, they’ve got my back even when I’m not there. And that’s somebody with good bonus. Let’s say you got a business partner, they’re going out and cutting a deal and, and they know, well, it’d be good for their side of the, the ledger, but then they’re thinking, well, how’s this gonna affect my.
So it’s that, it’s, are they in it just for the buck or just for what matters to them? Are they also interest? Are they, for me, in my interest. So that’s the second one. So now my, now my surgeon’s all ready to go. He is for me. I know he wants to get me back on the golf courts. He wants me to win. He cares about, uh, how my pain is doing.
And then all of a sudden he says, and I can’t wait to operate on your knee because I’m an OBGYN and I’ve never done a knee before. This is gonna be exciting. I go, whoa, whoa. Right? So the third box we gotta check is, is the ability. Do they, even though they might care and listen and before me, but do they have the ability to pull off what I’m, what I’m interested in them.
Now, in business, for example, this happens all the time. How many friends? They’re great friends. They go, we have so much fun together. We talk about business. We should start a company together. We should start a and, and you trust this person implicitly, but you get into a business partnership with ’em and you realize they don’t really have the ability to run a business.
They were successful because they were working in somebody else’s. But now I got a business bar. I feel like I’m rolling the boat all by myself. And you have, you have that film because a particular ability for that context, you wasn’t there. I got called into a company one time where the c e o was languishing and they wanted c e o coaching.
And I said, well, what, what’s going on? And they told me this story and I said, how did he become the c e o? And they said, well, he was the c o o for 10 years. And he is so successful in, in, he reorganized, you know, supply chains and infrastructure. And he oversaw and he was incredible and everybody loved him.
And so CEO retired, we made him the c e o. And I said, where do you get the e. They said, what do you mean? I said, well, he was the coo, now he’s the C E O. Where did he get the E? And they said, well, we promoted. I said, no, you gave him the chair, but where’d he get the chip? The E chipp? Because as I look at this scenario, you’ve got a great operator here and he was a C O O, but you don’t have c e o functioning.
And that’s why all the S you’re telling me about are languishing. He doesn’t right now at least have the skills and abilities so we can see if he can develop those. But they trusted him implicitly for good reason. But we gotta know somebody who’s got the ability to pull off what we’re interested with.
And so we check all those boxes. Well then you gotta look at the next one, which is character. And what I don’t only mean, and certainly we have to meet this, when people speak of character, often they’re just thinking about, you know, what we call basic integrity. They don’t lie sheet or steel. I can trust him.
Can you trust Scott? Oh yeah. He’d never lie to me or she never took, you know, so we trust their character. Well wait a minute. That’s moral functioning, which is foundational if somebody lies sheets and steal
and
star them. Right? Or do something to quarantine yourself from ’em. Cuz that’s, you can’t do anything if somebody’s liked.
But when my girls were five and six years old, they knew what lie sheet and steel meant, but they weren’t ready to run a business or to have something big and trusted in them. In this part of character, we’re talking about somebody’s makeup, how they’re glued together, you know, back to the surgeon.
Competent, understanding, great motive. What if he says, you know, I’m about to do one of these surgeries. Um, we got a theater in around the, or if you wanna watch me how this works, feel free. So I go to the theater, I’m watching my surgeon, Mr. Competent, Dr. Competent, and he opens up the guy’s leg and, and five minutes into it, he goes, breathing somebody.
No, he stopped breathing. Well, I need somebody that’s got the makeup of cool under pressure. You gonna put somebody in charge of a turnaround project, for example, if they’re the type that have to have a lot of at girls or attaboys and, and positive feedback all the time to feel good about themselves, there’s not gonna be any good news for a year.
You need to send somebody there who loves to eat problems for breakfast. Now you might trust the other person in another role. But how are they glued together? United Brother-in-law is a Navy seal. I would trust him to guard me against, you know, the mad guys who are coming after me, but mark’s not. I was gonna call the dark night of the soul when my dog dies, , there’s not, he’s gonna shut up.
What’s wrong with you just as dog? But my empathic friends, I’m not gonna call to guard me against, you know, , people coming to attack me. So we have to look at how somebody’s constructed. And, you know, you get into businesses and relationships like this and, and somebody’s makeup is a big deal. You know, the long-term research you get to a C-suite, for example, and Harvard’s this forever.
Everybody looks alike. You know, the same IQ and same background, same education, all this. But 90% of the real difference in the superstores has to do with their personal makeup. How they’re, how they’re constructed, how they’re glued together. And then the fifth one is what happened? The last one, the track record.
you know, they’re always the best predictor of the future is the past. That doesn’t mean somebody can’t have a horrible train wreck or you know, a past and become great, but you don’t see them have a horrible past in the next day be great like a New Year’s resolution. What you see is they develop a new past and you trust that.
So we have to see some sort of track record that somebody has been able to do what we’re asking them to do. Now, that doesn’t mean that that’s somebody that’s run one kind of a company in one business and go to a totally different business, and not, of course they can succeed, but they’ve, they’ve got the competencies and they’ve proven those over time.
They transfer,
so let’s talk about when the track record goes wrong. I’m thinking about what’s been happening with Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
They both have been in the news as bank failures. Let’s say you’re hired by the local savings and loan. And they say, how do we start crafting this message to get the public to start trusting us again after these big fallouts? And we’re talking about business here, but I think this also can do with you if you’re an employee.
Or what if the track record goes astray? How do we rebuild
that trust? Well, you know, it’s a great question because, you know, brands survive on the trust. They just do. And when you start this thing, if they come out with a lot of excuses and blaming and all of that, you know, and our persuasion of, yeah, the long-term markets did this and, you know, we didn’t control the interest rates, but we were blah, blah, blah, blah.
They better come out with that first box we talked about of having everybody understand that they understand what they did and how this affected people. And basically they gotta start with, you know, we get it. We have, um, we’ve really just, uh, eroded your trust. and we’ve caused a lot of damage to you and we know what this does to business.
That’s why we’re taking this so seriously. So I think they’ve gotta start there. And another thing, doc, is that this can’t be done in just a press release. You know, trust comes from proximity. And I think what they’ve gotta do is they’ve gotta create some real closeness to key stakeholders. An experience of that closeness to the concentric circles of the people whose trust they’ve got a bill.
You know, this is when, this is when key executives and CEOs need to get on airplanes and go sit down face-to-face with the right people and care enough to go there. I can’t tell you how many problematic situations that I’ve seen and been called into and the difference when the c e o or somebody. Of power goes and visits when they show up and they listen to the people and they feel understood, that’s the foundation.
Cuz now at least we have the neurological connection and you know, you can build this on Zoom, but you, you can better use Zoom to build something that you did in a room. I just think they need to create as much proximity as they can. That’s part of it. And then they’ve got to, you know, if you just go down the list, when they look at, when the people start to feel like their motive.
Is really to serve them and their interests, you know, and not just try, I mean, we all do business with entities where we get some notice or this, that, and the other. We think they’re just trying to cut costs. They don’t really care about how this affects me or whatever it is. They gotta show people that it’s not just them, that they’re interested in that it’s the other side, and then they gotta work down the list.
You know, there were some key competencies that they missed. I mean, a lot of people were saying, you know, when the money was so cheap and they were loading everything and they got their short of their long-term risk and reward upside down is basically what happened. A lot of people are looking at that going, you know, and voicing this and nobody’s really listening.
So anyway, they, I think they’re gonna work through this. And ask. And what I tell people in business when I, I’ve used this model for literally 20 years, maybe we just take the categories and number one say, okay, what in our business, how can we help the stakeholders know that we really get it? So we list those activities and then we put names to the activities.
Who’s gonna own that one? Who’s gonna call that relationship? Who’s gonna design this communication? And you’ve really gotta have, almost in the same way that you got a business strategy, I like to see people have trust strategies. It’s almost like a strategic plan. Another example is inside of companies, I just did this with the general counsel’s, uh, office with a, a global entity.
And the vision was, We want to change. Change the general counsel’s office from the department of no , because that’s how everybody feels about well run this past the lawyers. No lawyers say you can’t do this deal. You know? Now lawyers say it’s too none. Lawyers say you got too much exposure. They said, our vision is as general counsel, we want to become the department of yes, we want to be trusted that you can come to us and we’re gonna find a legal way to do what you want to do.
That’s trust. And they had a strategic plan of how to do that and you gotta focus on it. You just do.
So understanding motive. Character ability and track record something for our individual relationships as well as our business relationships. The book is trust, knowing when to give it, when to withhold it, how to earn it, and how to fix it when it gets broken.
Dr. Henry Cloud, tell us where and when the book
is available. Well, the book, uh, is available March 28th, and it’s wherever books are sold, you can, you can go to all that. If you go to dr cloud.com/trust, you will also get access, I think you’re still running in. Um, whenever you hear this, you get access to a three hour event, live event I’m gonna do on this, and you can stream that.
I think you get permission to stream it for the rest of the year. You play it for a whole company, you play it for a team, you can play it for an individual, and it’s free if you just buy the book. Well, Dr.
Henry Cloud, thank you for coming down to the basement. We appreciate having you.
Really enjoyed it.
Thank you for having me.
Hey, I’m Mr. We. And
I’m Mrs. Wow from Waffles on Wednesday
and we’re
not eating waffles. We’re Stacking
Benjamins. Thanks again to Dr. Henry Cloud for joining us, and thanks to you, Dr. G for a great interview, man. What’s a big takeaway you really get from this discussion? I have to
tell you, this book fundamentally changed my way about thinking about trust.
And the truth of the matter is we often don’t think about it very much. We either have this gut feeling that we should or shouldn’t trust people, or sometimes our default is just not to trust. And this book did a really good job of running through what trust is, how we go about thinking about trust, and ultimately what I took out of this in the end is we need trust for so much.
We need him for our personal relationships. . We needed also for our business relationships, like to be a good employer or to be a good employee, to trust someone you’re investing with. All of these things are, are things that come up all the time in our economic lives, and yet we never really codify what makes a good trusting relationship.
And I think Dr. Cloud answers that. And so I thought it was just a really great take on something that we do without thinking very consciously about.
It is interesting that a lot of these basic things like trust, we, we don’t think about the why behind it. And often I find that we have these competing morays, I guess because we’ve never examined them.
So because we haven’t examined them, we don’t understand why we think the way. Yeah. And the
truth about it is a lot of times our relationships don’t work out right. And sometimes we had that gut feeling like you’re like, okay, this guy I was working with or this person I went into business with, or even a spouse, you’re like, something doesn’t feel right here and yet I can’t put words on what it is.
And often that actually is trust and we just don’t know how to think about it in any way kind of organized manner, which is kind of what, what’s laid out in this book. And I think what could really help us in our
relationships
well, and I like how often it’s not them, it’s just you understanding the nature of the relationship better.
It’s definitely a
two-way street, right? So not only do the people we interact with have to be trustworthy, but we also have to be willing to give our trust. And so it very much is something that’s a very active interaction between two different people.
Well, this is very much an interview in the style of Earn An Invest What’s coming up on the Earn Invest podcast.
on the Earn and Invest podcast, we are continuing to have the conversations that push past the 1 0 1 to the 2 0 1. I just had Andrew and Dave Ahern from Investing for Beginners, that’s Andrew Sayer and Dave Ahern. They have an amazing podcast called Investing with Beginners and we talk about how you go about thinking about the stock market and investing.
Uh, it was a really great conversation. It was wonderful to have them on. And coming up next, we’re talking to Doug Cunnington. He is an entrepreneur, but almost by. Accident. It was quite unexpected. He kept on going through corporate America, telling himself he couldn’t be an entrepreneur, but eventually he started doing the things he was deeply interested in, the things he liked doing, and he became an entrepreneur even though he didn’t think he had it in him.
And I think a lot of us are like this, Joe. We get to this point where we know that corporate America isn’t fitting us, but we’ve always told ourselves that entrepreneurship is something that we can’t do or is not what we’re about. And yet when we start doing the things we like, we find that the steps maybe aren’t as difficult as we thought.
I love Doug Cunnington. What a great giving guy. He and his cohost, Carl Jensen, have the Mile High Five podcast, which is a lot of fun and people should definitely check out. Maybe what you’re saying is it’s time to trust our intuition, doc. Is that what you’re saying? Time to trust. Yeah. Trust in yourself, man.
You can. Hey, let’s Roth Haven lifeline guys and tackle some of life’s most important questions. Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency, og, they put what you, not Doug, not me, not random stacker, but you value most
presale Easter candy
shopping.
Presale. I like day after. Yeah. Easter Candy Sale. The thing is a pre-sale.
Like the
day after Valentine’s Day, they have all the Easter candy up.
But that’s not pre-sale, that’s just on sale, right? Saying that’s just poor sale, actually. For sale. Yeah. Pre Easter candy sales. I just,
I
just like the little Cadbury mini eggs, so I don’t care how the, how I get ’em. Oh God.
Are you
serious?
Oh yes. The crunchy shell and the milk chocolate on the inside. Doug. What are you, A comedy mini eggs? Not the, not the
ey.
Gooey. He’s like Cadbury eggs. And I think of the gooey ones that
are just presale is what they do. Like when Taylor Swift tickets go on sale, OG. There’s the pre-sale and then there’s, there’s,
there’s not a sale price, it’s just, I just want buy them sooner.
Yes. With Taylor Swift, there’s pre-sale and then there’s, you can’t get them. Yes. Like there’s, there’s no sale. Just pre-sale and no, sorry. Try again later. Uh, yeah. It’s your loved ones, your time. And what’s better than that? With Easter Candy, it’s why they made buying quality term life insurance. Actually simple.
You stuff yourself full of chocolate. Go to stacky Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife and their application. Simple. It’s online, instant coverage decision, affordable prices, all policies issued by their parent company, mass Mutual, more than 160 year old insured. Today we’re gonna throw out the lifeline to our friend Sammy.
Sammy asked this question in our Facebook group, the basement, and asked fellow stackers, but I thought that this was an interesting enough question and we actually. Had, uh, a long discussion about this og and partly because why it’s important. Sammy asks, for those with an hsa, how do you keep track of your HSA qualifying expenses?
Thank you. I know OG a lot of people have issues with that. They’re like, oh, there’s so many cool things you can do with an hsa. But then where my receipts, what do I do? First of all, can we explain why keeping track of your HSA qualifying expenses is important? Well, anytime
you wanna take money out of an HSA to pay for medical expenses, that that distributions tax free.
So you think, you put, you know, you put some tax free, I’m sorry, you put some money in your hsa, it has grown either through interest or your investment or whatever, and now you wanna withdraw some of that money unless you can match it up to some healthcare expenses. Then the IRS assumes that you’re just blowing the money.
So you’ve gotta be able to, to prove that was used for healthcare. So you gotta keep track of it. The hard part, like she’s talking about, is there’s no timetable on that distribution. So you can accumulate healthcare expenses for five years and then say, I’m gonna reimburse myself all of those today out of your hsa.
But you’re right, you’ve gotta keep track of it unless there’s one asterisk. Do you wanna know what that asterisk is now?
Oh, I thought you were just gonna go into it. . Yes.
If you withdraw the money after age 65, then you don’t have to worry about paying a penalty. But you still have to keep track of the expenses.
So keep good track.
Yeah.
Which is why a lot of people just recommend to spend the HSA sooner rather than later.
Yeah. I remember a couple budgeting experts saying that, saying, yeah, the after 65 thing is great, but how many people keep track of that stuff for For that long? Yeah. For 30 or 40 years. Right.
It’s just incredible. It’s like keeping, what’s that Gaffigan joke about keeping all his old computers? Cuz that’s where he still stores his photos. , they’re just photo storage locations now. Yeah. Speaking of that, Cheryl and I have like a period of about seven years where it was before online, you know, cloud storage.
I have no idea where those photos are. They’re on hard drive somewhere and they’re just gone
like, no idea. Along with the original, your original 10,000 units of Bitcoin, , it’s
a all, all in a landfill somewhere. I swear I had ’em. Coinbase, I swear. I don’t know why they’re not answering. Uh, lots of people talking OG about scanning, about havensheets, scanning it.
Man, if you’ve got one of these phone scanners that automatically places it in a folder, it’s a good quick way to do it. If you can remember to do that every time. Yeah, I mean
that, but then you also have to now keep track of that folder. It’s no different than paper, right? Like you have to, you have to have access to that Dropbox location, access to that Google Doc location for 35 years.
What we do is we just have everything charged to one credit card, and then we just print out the annual statements every year. There it is. Yes, I printed off. Yes, it’s a big amount. Yes, it’s a lot of paper and hopefully the ink doesn’t run out in the next two decades. I don’t know. Or dry up on the paper honestly, officer, it was written right here, said 8,000.
It’s a great question, Sammy, and I absolutely love the background on that question cuz HSAs can be so, so helpful. They’re a great thing. If you can get them, you’ll still get there without them. So if you don’t, if you’re not eligible for a hsa, no need to worry about it. But if you are eligible, I think it’s well worth exploring if that would be great for you and your family.
Well, and I also
think like if you have the extra money, you’ve maxed out your retirement plan, so on and so forth, there’s nothing to say that the rules that they have today are the same rules that they’re gonna have in the future. A great example of this is the 5 29, which has gotten a lot of publicity lately about the ability to kind of use some money for Ross.
And there’s a ton of rules around it and it’s not super easy and simple to do, but they created the 5 29 plan. Two decades ago, give or take. Right? And so now people are starting to find out what happens on the backend of that. And the people who are finding out about it are also the people who are serving in Congress, who probably started using five 20 nines and they’re like, crap, what do I gotta do?
oh, I gotta pass a law to make this, uh, the, some flexibility for me. under the guise of like helping everybody out. You know, there’s an interesting chart I saw about graphing the average net worth of the average US senator against the estate tax limitation. And it’s almost exactly what the average senator has, has a average net worth.
So over time, wow. Yeah. Weird, weird how they come up with those. So strange random $12,491,917 of exemption . Well, we gotta
make sure it’s helpful for real people. Og. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s helpful for real Americans. Yeah. Uh, stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail if you’ve got a question for the show.
Bring those along. As we mentioned on Monday, it’s a great time to ask questions of the show. We go in some cycles where sometimes it takes us a long time, but right now, man, we can get your question on.
And we prefer to have people go to the voicemail so that there’s another voice on the show instead of just our three droney voices.
Right. We want that variety versus leaving them in the basement.
Absolutely. And speaking of voices, uh, one thing I’ll mention also about Sammy, I wish Sammy would’ve actually called into the Haven Lifeline because she and her sister Michelle are podcasters that, uh, doc G and I have been mentoring with their show Build a Wealthy Spirit.
They just did a, a rebrand and, uh, been working hard on their show and, uh, good stuff. I hope everybody goes and listens to that show. So, Sammy, why didn’t you call in? Had she called
in? She could have done the shameless plug herself instead of relying on you. What?
That’ll be our next mentorship session.
Doug. Here’s what you do. stagger Benjamins dot com slash voicemail, Sammy and everybody else. For us to answer your question. All right. Uh, lots going on in the basement. We’ve got a great guide for that. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash welcome. You can find all the different places. We mentioned the basement, the 2 0 1.
We’ve also talked in the past about our Instagram channel, where we do lives. We also do lives on YouTube and the fireside app meet with us in a lot of different places. We try to be, wherever you are, stack Benjamins dot com slash welcome for that. But if you’re not here to just hang out with us, don’t know why you wouldn’t be, but if you’re here because you actually.
Actually are pretty worried about what’s going on in the economy, what you see on the news about what should I do about all these things that I can’t control. I got something better that I’d like you to do than panic. Do this. Check out this free guide that OG and his team put together that’ll help you plan more and panic less no matter what the market does.
Has some great insights on what you should be doing and smart questions to ask yourself so that you make financial decisions that your future self will. Thank you for Stacking Benjamins dot com slash guide to get that helpful free guide from og Stacking Benjamins dot com slash guide. Alright, I think that buttons up our community calendar.
Uh, Doug. You got it from here, man. What should we have learned today? Well,
Joe first take some advice from Dr. Henry Cloud on the foundations of trust and how to apply them to have more rewarding relationships in life and business. Second kids at home, maybe it’s time to check the security settings on your phone, but the big lesson when you set up a trail cam, it’s important to read the directions first.
I just checked, I got a ton of footage of myself walking around the house. Holy . I do nothing all.
This show is the Property of SB podcast’s L L C, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen Repine. This show was written by Laci Langford, who’s also the host of the military Money Show. With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the four 11 on all Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Tina eichenberg makes the video version of this show. Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now.
Why don’t chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend, Gertrude and Kate Youngin are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. So say hello. When you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement.
Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know this. Show us for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Doug, you’re a dog lover. Yes, I am. I am unabashedly a dog.
Your dogs, uh, rescue dogs. You pay for the dogs.
One is a rescue, like a legit, like would’ve died if we didn’t rescue ’em. So one is definitely a, a rescue sweetest dog ever. OG dog person. O G’s comment is, I don’t own anything that eats when I
sleep.
Sheryl got bit by a dog. What’s funny, not funny is the dog’s name was Bear. Um, so, you know, she jokes that she got bit by a bear, but of course the dog owner was like, he’s never done that before. He’s never done that to anybody. It wouldn’t. So big eye roll there. But how about this for, for big eye roll?
This is from the New York Post. This dude, uh, bought a dog and the dog bit him. And then after the dog bites him that he bought supposedly from a breeder, the dog then starts laughing and the guy says, the laugh wasn’t like a dog laughing, it was like a person laughing. Yeah, Doug . And he realized
he bought a hyena.
Oh my God,
man, who goes by infrared savage on TikTok posted this, uh, and, and the piece by the way says catfished, more like dog fished, but, um, bu there’s a, come on, og, give me the gimme the, no. There it is. His experience. He got scammed online over a quote puppy . He, he bought 3.3 million people, watched it eager to purchase.
We would play it, but it is so full of obscenities. This guy, every fourth word is, uh, a word that we would have to beep out, eager to purchase a pup. The man replied to an online post from a bully breeder looking to sell, supposedly an American bully. Sounds good. Two minute clip. TikTok er explains how he instantly fell in love with photos, the dog’s parents, and put down a deposit.
Guy brings the dog home. Dog doesn’t look anything like the parents, but he’s like, okay, maybe it’s gonna grow up and look like the parents. And then the thing bites him and starts laughing. , wow, what, what a horrible day. What a
horrible day. I’ve had some instances where not bites or dogs have never bitten anybody, but were, they do things with people they don’t know that I haven’t seen them do before.
And so I would, I’m willing to bet that when, that, when that dog bear bit Cheryl and the owner says, never done that before. I, I bet. Yeah. He was telling the truth. Dogs will do weird things that you don’t expect. So I mean, our rescue Charlie, he’s, he’s that way. I mean, he’ll, he’ll growl at times. He’s never done anything about it.
He’s never, but he’ll growl at times and you think, what the hell are you growling for? He spent a year in a pretty awful situation, so who knows?
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