After Monday’s primer on why your portfolio needs some international flavor, we’re following up with a deeper dive—this time with someone who lives and breathes global markets. Joe Saul-Sehy and OG welcome Joy Yang, Head of Index Product Management at MarketVector Indexes, to talk through how to actually invest beyond U.S. borders.
Joy explains how ETFs can help investors capture international growth while minimizing risk—and why country-specific and sector-specific ETFs might just be your new best friend. You’ll also hear insights on investing in private markets, the rise of digital assets, and whether private equity in your 401k is a brilliant idea… or a cautionary tale.
But don’t worry, the basement stays weird. Doug brings the trivia heat with a Martha Stewart–Eliot Spitzer stumper, and the episode wraps with some creative audience feedback (including one Stackers’ AI-powered school project that caught our attention).
Topics Covered:
- How to diversify globally without overcomplicating your portfolio
- The power of ETFs for targeting specific markets and sectors
- What you really need to know before considering private equity in retirement accounts
- Balancing simplicity with opportunity in a world of shiny investment options
- The limits of “going big or going home” when it comes to risk and return
Stackers, if you’re looking for smart ways to expand your portfolio’s reach—or just curious what index creators think about Bitcoin—this episode delivers insights, laughs, and a grounded reminder: simple can still be smart.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Mentor: Joy Yang
Big thanks to Joy Yang for joining us today. To learn more about Joy and the team at MarketVector, visit MarketVector About us people.
Our Headline
- Exclusive | 401(k) Giant Empower to Offer Private Credit and Equity in Retirement Accounts (Wall Street Journal)
Doug’s Trivia
- Who was the politician who had Martha Stewart arrested?
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: The Case for International Investing & The True ROI of Emergency Funds (SB1690)
Episode transcript
STACK 06-04 Joy Yang -steve
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Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. On Monday we took a deep dive into building out your international portfolio. So today let’s take that one step further and chat with a woman who builds global indexes.
She’s the head of index product management at Market Vector indexes, joy Yang. And in our headline, while we help you diversify better, wall Street is helping you bury yourself alive. We’ll share developments and you can be sure that halfway through this fun house, I’ll rock your socks off with my incredible trivia question.
And now two guys who are ready to help you build interest faster and pay less. It’s Joe [00:01:00] and oh G.
Joe: Are those pay less shoe centers still a thing? Like the pay less shoe stores? That’s exactly where my head went. I was wondering how can I make a joke out of this? We can be the Payless podcast on every street corner.
Hey everybody, welcome back to Stacky Benjamin’s. It’s international investing week. Steve’s bringing in the international tones to today’s show. We, we seem totally international. OG has the beret on again, which totally fits. I don’t know about that. His,
Doug: his, look, I’m painting a picture here. He’s got the little espresso cup with his pinky out that I do have.
Legs are crossed in that awkward way. Doug’s shoving baguettes
Joe: in his Well, that’s no different. Yeah, that’s just wing dead baguettes in his pie hole. Every chance he gets. But, uh, we are helping you add international investing to your portfolio and as you said so eloquently, Doug Joy Yang joins us og. She is head of index product management at Market Vector [00:02:00] indexes.
It’s based in New York City. They create the indexes that exchange traded fund companies base their exchange traded funds on. So she’s somebody that A, doesn’t have a product that you and I could buy. So I really like, uh, going next level with that. And second, she’s somebody that’s on top of international investment opportunities all day, and that’s why she’s our Wednesday mentor.
But first, before Joy, we have a couple sponsors that make sure that this is all free. You don’t have to pay anything for all this international investing that we’re doing this week. All the talk to help you build a portfolio, we’re gonna hear from a couple of those sponsors now. And then Joy Yang, our Wednesday mentor joins us in mom’s basement.
Ann, I am super happy we have the pro here. Joy [00:03:00] Yang joins us. How are you?
Joy: I’m good, thank you. And sorry, I apologize for the lighting.
Joe: No, that’s okay. What everybody who’s listening only doesn’t know is that we’ve changed rooms and now the lights keep going off and the room that joy’s in. So everybody walking by is gonna watch her waving her arms and
Joy: like a crazy person.
Joe: Well, that’s how fun stacking Benjamins is. Joy, I mean, really. Okay. That’s exactly what it is. You know, a lot of our stackers joy are just, they’re new to investing and they really don’t know how they can get into international investments. I mean, there’s direct placements, there’s ADRs, there’s mutual funds.
I lost most of our audience there. But you guys do one thing in particular, which is exchange traded funds, which. We really have an appreciation for, but let’s just do the basic definition. What is an exchange trade of fun and kind of how does it work?
Joy: Joy. Well, if you take the words independently, it is a fund, which is essentially [00:04:00] a basket of stocks or bonds or multi-asset that’s inside a wrapper, um, which you share with other investors so that you share all the costs of buying, trading, custodying, the stocks and bonds within that fund.
And the beauty of an exchange traded fund is it takes this fund and then it allows you to trade it on an exchange just like a stock. So we all know how to trade a Microsoft or Amazon, well, you can also trade hundreds of names inside a fund on the exchange in one transaction. So it allows us to really buy cheaply.
Hundreds of names, US names, international names, stocks and bonds, and one transaction at a lower cost than if you were to do it on your own where you would have to open and count in different countries, have a custody, make sure you take care of the currency, take care of corporate actions. So you allow your fund manager to do this across multiple shareholders, and it [00:05:00] allows you to have exposure to a very diversified baskets of stocks, bonds, and other assets.
Joe: I love the point there that it really allows investors, our everyday investors, to do what wealthy people already know, right? If I invest in several things, my chance of losing money goes down. Certainly because the chance of everything going down together is. Is less, but I couldn’t imagine buying all the things in one index at one time.
I’d never thought about that. Like that’s 50 pages on my, on my screen where wherever I’m trading.
Joy: Yeah. And probably the other benefits of an ETF is that you can actually see what names you’re holding inside the ETF.
Joe: Oh, complete transparency.
Joy: Yeah. So that’s transparency. So that allows you to understand much more.
Um. How you know what names you’re buying. It’s not a black box. So you know, you know, you can watch the, you know, individual names, stocks, and bonds move, but you’re now holding it all together inside a fund. And it’s [00:06:00] very transparent. Many of these ETFs are also linked to indexes, and that’s what we do.
We’re an index provider. And indexes usually have a rule or a methodology that outlines exactly what they’re allowed to buy, how the weighting structure works, you know, which countries they can invest in. So all of that is very clear. So it’s almost like reading the ingredients on a can or menu so that you know exactly how it should taste, how it should smell, and what you’re getting
Joe: looking at, uh, market investors’, list of ETFs.
You have all kinds of ETFs and we had a show just recently. About where people are really flourishing joy, and one of those countries was Indonesia and I was just in Indonesia. It’s been like a year and a half ago. It was amazing. But if I buy the Indonesia ETF, which I see that you have market vectors, has an Indonesia ETF.
What you’re saying is that means I’m buying an index of stocks that are all Indonesian companies.
Joy: Yes. We provide the [00:07:00] index that’s linked to the ETF. We provide the rules of which stocks qualify, and usually we look for rules that, you know, will make it investible. So many Indonesia, stocks trade, but they’re not all investible because either they’re too illiquid, they don’t trade all the time, or they’re quite expensive.
So we’re trying to filter it down for people who use our index to construct ETFs. They know already that they’re getting a very. Tradable investible products, and we have Indonesia, we have Vietnam, we have Brazil, we have multi-country indexes. And the, the main focus that we try to provide is what are the investible names in this universe?
Because in you’re trading in ETF, you’re trading baskets of these names very quickly, and we wanna make sure you’re reducing your costs because you know, cost is also the other factor that drags down performance.
Joe: Yeah, that is an upside is that even though you’re in Indonesia, let’s say, or [00:08:00] Brazil to your point, or wherever you’re buying at such a, such a low fee versus these managers that are going out hunting for stuff that need to be paid.
I mean, people need to be paid for the good work that they do. We talked about individual countries. What we haven’t talked about is you guys also do indexes that are based on sectors of the market as well, and some of your indexes are sector indexes. Can we switch from globally as defined by country to global is defined by sector.
What’s the difference between those two concepts?
Joy: A sector is where we categorize or bucket the world into clusters of stocks or bonds or assets that really have very similar risk and reward characteristics. So for us, we think of these sectors as themes, you know, because. AI is a theme that clearly everybody wants to participate in now.
Never heard of it. No, I’m kidding. [00:09:00] Yeah. You mean by ai? You know, like where’s this ai, you know, is it a software? Is it the hardware? Is it the data? Is it the adopters that are using it, like the Apples and the Amazon to actually produce and increase productivity? Or is it like the semiconductors that are making all of this happen through their hardware and through the innovation that they’re doing at the semiconductor level?
For us, we start with, well, what do you mean by ai? And then how do you then filter for those stocks that are going to capture the growth in ai? By doing that, then you’re participating in what your expectation about the opportunities and the growth as well as the risk in tracking AI companies.
Joe: And that was my next question is.
Investing in a single sector. Definitely. You mentioned the upside, right? Is that, hey, if I think that you’ve got global defense industry I’m looking at right now as an example, if I think global defense industry is a growth area, man, I hope not. But if it’s a, [00:10:00] if it’s a growth area and these companies grow, then I make more money.
If I invest in Indonesia and I’m right, I make more money. But you also mentioned, you know, we can go regionally, we can go just worldwide. What are the risks versus the upsides of each of these different ways of getting into exchange traded funds?
Joy: So I think it’s very important to remember that you don’t get reward without taking on risk, and we would never say.
Put a hundred percent of your allocation into, whether it’s defense or ai, you know, you have to think carefully about where you want to tilt, maybe some of your outlook towards, and you know, we’ve also seen very recently that you can have 500 US companies, but maybe seven of them contribute to the majority of the weight in your portfolio or the performance.
So, you know, having 500 stocks doesn’t necessarily mean that you are diversified. You know, you still may be concentrated. So when you think about using sectors and international countries, you’re [00:11:00] really trying to diversify some of the performance that you may hold in the rest of your portfolio because they’re going to move.
In different times, up and down, not always together because they’re being driven by different types of risks. So defense as a global, um, theme won’t all be exposed to US government terrorists because we know, you know, across the world, they’re trying to reduce their reliance to US military. So all of these international companies are trying to invest back into their own, uh, military companies.
And so that’s going to contribute through these structural investment by government into the growth of European defense companies outside of the us. So I think it’s important to think about, you know, you can get. Global diversification and you can get sector diversification and you can be targeted by using both of those kind of levers to [00:12:00] access growth where you think is gonna happen, but still give you some kind of diversification.
Joe: Let’s have a little fun, which I’m glad we talked about. Risk first before we talk about fun at Market Vector. Your company looks at so many different indexes and so many possibilities for investing. What seems exciting to you, and I wanna caution all our stackers, by exciting stackers, I don’t mean that this is where you should put your money.
I just want to talk about what are some of the cool things like I’m looking right now and I’ll just give you one. I think digital India, I didn’t even really know what that means, but I think India and I think digital together, and to me, joy, that’s, that just seems like an exciting place to be. I don’t know if it’s gonna be good.
I don’t know if it’s gonna be bad, but it certainly is exciting.
Joy: And I think going back to what, how you started, always remember there’s risk, right? In focusing on these exciting part of the world, you have to have an understanding of the long-term structural shifts in these exciting parts of the world.[00:13:00]
India. Um, not only is the government kind of supporting initiatives into digital infrastructure, but it has a very strong demographic base. So you think of this is a very young tech savvy population that’s using, that’s very digital, like, um, aware, and it also has a rising middle class that’s spending money.
And on top of that, the markets are really evolving. So it has a very strong pipeline of IPO coming out. So all of this kind of contributes to the exciting part of why you want to focus on. India and focus on digital India, but at the same time, be aware, don’t put a hundred percent right into this way.
Joe: Yeah, I’ve learned this a hard emerging markets joy is my favorite thing, and I always have to caution myself, like, just because I’m excited about what’s going on in Vietnam right now does not mean that I should put every dollar in Vietnam. [00:14:00]
Joy: Right. But also like this is an area where we are also seeing, because we’ve been so focused on the US and us exceptionalism, we forget there are really cheap, equally exciting parts of the world out there.
And we know that America is exceptional, but innovation can happen anywhere. And we saw that with deep seek and you know, so we have to, oh yeah, open up your opportunity set, but also be aware that when you look at emerging markets, you’re not just getting kind of the company risk, you’re also getting the country risk.
And as we saw with, you know, examples like Russia, there’s, you know, very strong political risks also that may knock the whole country out. You know, so when. Russia invaded Ukraine. We had sanctions and that essentially took down the whole capital markets and people had to write off their assets in funds that held Russian stocks and companies.
Joe: I think we definitely have to think about that whenever [00:15:00] we’re going into any, if we’re getting country specific. I mean, we just talked about how exciting it is in India. Right now, but if the Indian government decides to change the game, that could change the whole opportunity on Monday. Joy, we were talking about the countries that were leading the way, and I’m just curious and no is an acceptable answer ’cause this might not be your area of expertise.
Poland, as the time of our recording was the number one place since the beginning of the year in the world up 33% of the time we, do you have any idea why Poland’s leading the way?
Joy: Okay, so we saw Poland and also countries like Germany are right up on top double digits. But I would always be careful about looking at any short term.
Sure. Timeframes and I still think that’s quite short term because if you look at the long history, whether it’s Poland, US, Germany. Markets are volatile. So in any short term periods they can be up 30%. They can be down 30%.
after show: Yeah.
Joy: Right [00:16:00] Now we know that there’s a lot of countries we’re down 30%. Mm-hmm. So maybe they’re just reverting back to their fundamental valuation.
Um, and we’ve seen the opposite countries like the US were up 20% back to back two years in a row, and that’s not normal. And it means like sometimes you overvalue a particular area and sometimes you’re undervaluing it and then you know, for whatever reason, you know, in aggregate, the market then comes back and adjust and tries to reflect any information that they’ve absorbed recently back into the price.
Joe: Another risk when you invest internationally, I know is currency risk, right? The us, if you’re a US investor, you’re investing dollars, which could change the game. If you’re in a different country, it might be a great investment, it could be a horrible investment for us or. Or, or vice versa. I know an area that you have a lot of expertise on is in digital assets.
Do you find that digital assets like Bitcoin are kind of changing that [00:17:00] game?
Joy: Yes. Bitcoin is just one digital asset and it happens to have a very strong use case for a store of value. Mm-hmm. Um, it’s independent, so it’s not related to any single government. It’s decentralized. And more importantly, as you know, we’ve seen that there’s been a lot of, I guess, backlash against us, assets us and try people trying to unwind their reliance on US treasuries or the dollar.
Bitcoin actually has trust built into the software because at the end of the day, it’s a software. It’s not issued by any single government. So I think people are looking at Bitcoin as a store value that won’t be influenced by some of these macro risks that we’re seeing in the market. And it has a strong.
Case like digital gold for preserving value. And as we see institutional players come into the market, as we see regulatory clarity come [00:18:00] into the market, we’re seeing the speculative aspects of Bitcoin because crypto assets, we know that the price is volatile. It’s young industry, people are still trying to learn about it, and the investor base is changing.
So the price is hugely volatile. But as we see this kind of maturing of the asset class, the maturing of Bitcoin, we’re seeing the price volatility come down. And if you actually look at Bitcoin, it’s actually less volatile than, you know, stocks like Nvidia, Palantir, or Coinbase. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah.
So it has, you know, huge, it’s shifting its behavior and it’s becoming more of an established investment option for people. But. You know, I would still caution individuals to put all of their money into Bitcoin, but you can also look at it now. ’cause I think a lot of your listeners may be hesitant about holding Bitcoin because of how to access it, how to make sure your password is [00:19:00] kept safe and how to custody it.
Joe: That was my, my very next question, actually, you beat me to it.
Joy: It is now available in an ETF format. So you don’t have to worry about all of those things. And you can trade it on the exchange, on a regular exchange the same way you do other stocks. And you don’t have to worry about a password or, um, safekeeping because your fund manager and your ETF provider will do that for you.
Joe: Or that horror story in the uk You know that story of the guy in the UK that, uh, what he, I think he wanted, yes. Now he’s trying to get permission. Yeah. Don’t have to do any of that. When it comes to international investing, you talked quite a few times about, you know, remember not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Make sure that you’re diversified and really base this on your goals. Where do we really start? Do we start thinking, okay, maybe half of my money in different international investments is a good place to start, 30%? Like [00:20:00] really what’s the rubric? I obviously know you can’t answer that question directly, but I guess what’s the structure of my thinking around how much of my money should be international joy?
Joy: I think it’s always start with what is your risk tolerance? You know, be honest with yourself because right now is the perfect time to think about, oh, I thought I was very high risk. But if you can’t sleep at night, you know, given the current marker the last six months, right, right. You’re probably not. So you need to dial it down, you know, and as we go out the spectrum from developed markets to emerging markets, we’re picking up more risks, not just political risks, but economic risk.
As you mentioned, currency risk, custody risk. You know, all of those risks kind of expand. They expand the reward that you can get out of these countries, but their real risks at any one point in time, those countries, as you mentioned, can shut down and your money can be locked in. So what’s your risk tolerance?
If you can take risk and you [00:21:00] have a long-term horizon, this may be a great opportunity because. Then the other aspect is you have to focus on your long-term goals. You know, if you have the time, don’t listen to day-to-day headlines. Just be convicted or convinced about your long-term investment case. I think the other aspect is to keep it simple.
You know, if you are in an ETF wrapper, you let the fund manager and the ETF provider handle a lot of these issues around, you know, what happens when a small country gets locked up? What happens with currency management? What happens with corporate actions? Just let somebody else deal with it, and then let them tell you the performance and the risk and the characteristics that you need to think about to understand your long-term goals.
Joe: I wanna talk just briefly about what you guys do at Market Vectors. ’cause a lot of people don’t really understand what you do, but you’re creating the indexes that a lot of these ETFs we talked about earlier are built on.
Joy: Mm-hmm. Yes. [00:22:00] So we’re designing things in a very role-based way. So that takes a lot of the maybe active discretion out of it because when you start thinking that you can time the market or you know you can overweight Nvidia or Apple because you have some inside knowledge, just be aware.
There are a lot of smart people out there, and they’re all kind of on the other side of the trade from you, but if you’re being consistent and you’re taking kind of the emotional investing out of it and you know you, you have a rule that you’re following and you’re rebalancing in line with that rule, then essentially you’re letting the index do the portfolio management for you.
And it’s shown that over the long term, if you’re constructing a very diversified index, it does what it says it’s going to do. So you won’t be disappointed, you know?
Joe: Well, you know what I love about indexes [00:23:00] and what you guys do, joy, is that it’s self cleaning, which is a part that I think people don’t realize.
If a company no longer qualifies for the index, you take it out. So I don’t have to weed the garden as much. I can still keep my conviction, and I don’t have to be picking out the companies that don’t matter anymore. You take care of that for me.
Joy: And also if a new company comes in, we’re considering whether or not it fits into that index.
Good point. You can’t possibly know like the thousands of companies that come into the market every day as well as the companies that disappear from the market. Part of what we also focus on is education. So it’s not enough to like think, oh, I wanna be in ai, but we try to. Provide the investment insight into what does that mean?
How do we construct it? Because I think the most important aspect of being an investor is being humble about what you don’t know. You know? So you have to do your [00:24:00] homework, we’ll provide as much of the material for you, but you also have to do the homework and you have to, you know, really understand what you’re investing in because there’s so many indexes out there.
You can design your world to do anything, but just make sure you understand what it does. So I always think, don’t just trust that it’s index and wrapped up inside an ETF. You have to really think about, does this fit into my total portfolio? Does it match my risk tolerance? And do I have the investment horizon for this particular asset?
Joe: To your point, there was a few years ago a situation with oil, and I was reading online somebody who I. Was picking an oil index, which the majority of our stackers don’t get industry specific like that. But when they did, they picked it purely based on price, not realizing really what was going on under the hood.
So I love the education aspect, joy, because there’s really a little more we need to know than just what’s the cheapest thing to buy? Like what are they actually, what are they actually [00:25:00] doing there? And to get some of that education, where do we go? Just to market vector.com.
Joy: Go to market vector.com. We have lots of insight papers, but also listen to these podcasts like yours.
You know, I love listening to these investment podcasts because they, you know, yours makes it fun. A lot of them are very targeted, whether it’s around just crypto assets or just FinTech indexes and ETF opportunities. You know, there are a wide variety of them, but I always say, do as much of the homework as you can.
Be curious. Think about international markets. You know, ’cause we’re also, we’re focused on American companies ’cause that’s what we know. You know? Right. See all day the home bias. Yeah. So I think listen to international news and try to be open to understanding. There are other companies in whatever auto space, semiconductor space, every space has international categories in it.
And I. Companies that could be [00:26:00] the next, you know, star in that category.
Joe: It’s so fun. It’s like this rabbit hole joy that, as you know, that doesn’t end like is a money geek, which clearly you and I are. It’s so fun. Thank you for mentoring our stackers today and helping us build international into our portfolio.
I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. So fun.
Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and back in 2003, a woman who stacked tons of Benjamin’s. The Martha Stewart was indicted for securities, fraud and obstruction of justice. She was one of the most famous personalities that a certain prosecutor trying to become governor was rounding up.
Here’s today’s question. Who was the politician who had her arrested? I’ll be back right after I go figure out what Joe’s mom really does. Upstairs all day, that woman shifty.
[00:27:00] Hey there, stackers. I’m private investigator and guy who has a lifetime subscription to Martha’s Magazine. Joe’s mom’s neighbor died well, while Martha Stewart is great at Color Combos, I’m sure she didn’t know that Orange was her new color until today’s date back in 2003 when she was indicted by a prosecutor with big aspirations.Sadly, these were all dashed with self-inflicted wounds when he was identified as client number nine in what became a major FBI investigation. Unfortunately, by this time, Elliot Spitzer had become governor of New York. Yes. That Elliot Spitzer dad insult to injury. It was later found that Spitzer had spent $80,000 on prostitutes.
Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Oops. My bad. Should I have said talk about insider trade? Right? That’s, that’s, that’s maybe the best innuendo I’ve ever come up with. That’s so bad. [00:28:00] That’s equal to almost 800 Benjamins. Buy the meme coin now kids and now two guys who would rather invest that money in a way that would be almost equal, almost equal to 800.
Benjamins chose doing math and he said $80,000 is almost equal. Two guys who would rather invest that money in a way that would last longer than three minutes back to Joe and og
Joe: pay him for three minutes and then tears in the quarter.
Doug: Yep.
Joe: It’s so, so, so bad. Remember that ugliness and everybody Spitzer went after was out of the state of New York, shockingly nobody that could vote for him, for governor, did he go after, he went after, uh, Invesco in Houston. He went after strong funds in Wisconsin.
He goes after, uh, Martha’s. What he really
Doug: went after was headlines.
Joe: He totally was just, uh, ugh. Those were, uh, not great times. [00:29:00] Let’s do a headline, everybody.
Well, while we’re talking about helping you add international into your portfolio in a responsible way, that will give you good diversification. Wall Street’s found a way to fleece you even more. Og. This is news a couple weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Anter Wright 401k Giant to allow private market investments into your retirement portfolio.
Isn’t that great? No, this is this, this is so stupid. Uh, let’s read more. Retirement Savers are about to see private market wait investments.
Doug: Can you try to say the author’s name
Joe: anon? You got it. Okay. I said it earlier. Oh, I’m sorry.
after show: Yeah.
Joe: Well, how often do we, I mean, Ann’s a badass. We have not had Anne on the show, but she’s written so many great pieces [00:30:00] for the Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, she’s incredible. But I did get this one. You just like her. ’cause you can pronounce it. That’s the reason you think she’s
Doug: so great.
Joe: That’s why Ann’s a badass. Thank you for having a name that I can pronounce. So, more Retirement Savers about to see private markets in their portfolios. The 401k Giant Empower will start allowing private credit equity and real estate in some of its accounts.
It administers later this year. The firm announced a couple weeks ago, it’s joined with seven firms to offer these investments, including Apollo Global Management and Partners Group. So Apollo Global goes to empower and goes, you know what, og, we can make a bunch more money off of. People think and they need something they might not need.
Let’s talk about what is private. For people that don’t know what private que credit, credit, equity, and real estate is, what exactly are we talking about people might be seeing in their 401k coming soon?
OG: Well, I mean, when you say private, I think the opposite of private is public. When I think of public companies, I think of [00:31:00] big companies that we recognize, companies that we can invest in publicly, Amazon and Apple and you know, Johnson and Johnson and whatever.
So when you take away the public and make it private, so it’s gotta be private companies, companies that you can’t. Easily invest in publicly when there are firms that are growing but aren’t ready to go to the public markets yet. A lot of times private investment firms will lend them money or will help invest side by side with them or be part of their investment to grow.
You look at like, uh, like a WeWork or something like that from years ago, right? But until they went public, they were funded. And sometimes you’ll hear this on the news, you know that such and such a company raised $200 million. Well, what does that mean? That means that somebody took an ownership in that entity for an investment, and then they think that this investment is worth some number.
Above that, all you’re doing is you’re adding another layer of complexity. You’re adding another [00:32:00] layer of hard to do due diligence because private companies don’t have public financials, right? So you can’t say, well, how much does the ice cream shop make to use my ice cream shop analogy that Doug always loves.
You just have to trust that the firm that’s doing the investing with you side by side with you, has done that and say that it’s a good thing. But they don’t have any responsibility to you. Their responsibility is to their shareholders and their investors. And so if you’re an investor in something and you know you’re gonna sell it in the future, what do you want that investment to do?
You want it to go up. And so you’ll do whatever you need to do to make that investment go up, even if it’s not at the benefit of all the other investors. So not saying that it’s always like that, but you’re adding a significant layer of, of, uh, opaqueness, I guess to the whole investing process in the hopes of doing what?
I just don’t understand, like what, what’s the beneficial outcome of investing in a private equity fund or private credit, God forbid, or [00:33:00] private real estate, which we know a lot of. We have seen that over the years. Right? I mean, you and I, Joe, have had a lot of experience in the private real estate side of the equation.
It’s awful. It’s just, it
Joe: sucks. You see things go bad and as a person in it, you’re locked in it. You can’t get out. You’ve got no recourse. You’ve signed a bunch of paperwork that says you can’t sue them. You’ve got all of this just ugliness that can happen. I, I just don’t understand why, especially when study after study OG shows that you can become a multimillionaire just using the basic stuff in your 401k, even if it’s a high fee, 401k, you can still get there.
Why? Why we think that more complexity equals better, more complexity doesn’t equal more better. It equals more complexity.
after show: Yeah.
Joe: Just drives me crazy. The line I love is this, this paragraph and then the next line. Wall Street firms have been pushing to get private [00:34:00] investments into the hands of individual investors.
Let’s actually stop there for a second in sidecar here, og, because you have said a million times banks will find their way to make money. You are seeing right now the Trump administration rolling back stuff the Biden administration did to lower the, the huge fees people were doing on overdrafts and all these protections, right?
Rolling them back. And Cheryl said, well, that’s horrible. I don’t like the fact they’re rolling ’em back. And I said, banks are gonna find a way to make money off you no matter what. Yes. Are these fees horrible? Yes. Banks will find another horrible fee. What have Wall Street firms seen? Wall Street firms have seen you?
Investor demand that, you know what the expense ratios on the funds you use in your 401k get lower and lower and lower and lower. So as they see that, guess what Wall Street firms are doing. You know what we should do? Private equity and you know, private equity is something you probably need as you see your mutual fund fee go down.
It drives me crazy.
OG: Yeah.
Joe: They see the $12.4 [00:35:00] trillion market for 401k type of retirement plans is crucial to this growth, of course and rights. Of course, I got $12.4 trillion over here that I can’t get my hands on. Oh, we gotta go, we gotta go talk to Congress about maybe being able to get something done here.
And power, which oversees 1.8 trillion, they’re one of the biggest, well they are the biggest provider yet to offer these investments in 4 0 1 Ks. Then Ed Murphy, the chief executive advisor at Empower says this, A lot of private asset managers see tremendous opportunity there. Mochi, they see tremendous opportunity.
OG: Sure. There’s no, uh. Kickback sounds so evil to say, doesn’t it? Oh, I’m sure there’s no kickback between PE firms and, uh, it’s so
Joe: transparent. Yeah, it’s so transparent. And then Ed of course, then says, and we believe there are tremendous opportunities for retirement investors and private investing.
OG: Yeah. I mean, again, this all boils down to risk and return.
Ultimately, the more difficult it is to get [00:36:00] clear data, the higher the expected return has to be. Look at your lending profile of your personal balance sheet, and you see how this works, right? It’s like the tighter the loan is. IE so you go to get a mortgage or you go to refinance. You have a million dollar house that you’re trying to get a 500,000 mortgage on.
The bank will be like, oh yeah, here’s, here’s the money. They don’t, there’s like not a lot of paperwork involved in that. Like they’re, they’re good with like, if you’ve got a job, you’re gonna do that, right? You’re, it’s no problem. ’cause there’s very little risk to them. ’cause they have, there’s a ton of equity in the house that you don’t wanna give up.
You can miss a year’s worth of payments. They can still take your house and sell it and make their money back and, you know what I mean? Like, there’s very, very, very little risk to the bank for that. So because there’s very little risk to the bank, they are gonna receive very little return relative to other things.
Now look at something like your Visa card, which has a $30,000 limit and tomorrow you can charge it to 30,000 like that. And [00:37:00] they won’t stop you until it gets to $30,001. And frankly, sometimes they won’t even stop you above 30,000. They will just like go, oh, I’m sure it’s okay. And then you can stop paying it altogether.
And what happens, they don’t get any of it. They can sue you and you can say, well, I don’t have it. You can file bankruptcy. And they go, I don’t have it. So there’s a lot more risk with that. It’s unsecured debt. So what’s the return? On that loan? Well, the return on that investment for the bank to flip it around and just look at the bank as an investor.
The bank’s return on investments 30% or 25% chain, right? They have to get a higher return on the riskier things. And banks are experts at this. They know exactly what those prices need to be or what those investment returns need to be in large piles of people. ’cause they say, well I know if I lend this, use this credit card with a million people, there’s gonna be some number of them that say to hell with you, I’m not paying.
Right? But so it evens out. So look at yourself as an investor and say, well, if I invest in US treasuries, what kind of return should I expect? Well, you [00:38:00] should expect a pretty low return. It’s guaranteed it’s gonna be there. What if I invest in this company that I can’t read any of the financials and somebody’s down the line went, ah, it’s probably good.
Trust us. Well, you better get a hell of a good return. You know, because you don’t have any data on that. It’s way riskier. Do you need that in your plan? Do you need, when you solve for your financial plan and your retirement analysis, do you need 22%? The answer is you don’t. No one does. And, and if you have a 20% return potential, you also have a negative 80% return potential.
You don’t get one end without the other. So, um, there’s no, there’s no usefulness in this. The other thing that drives me crazy with this, by the way, is there used to be some pretty heavy, uh, qualification rules, you know, and, and what’s interesting, of course, Joe, is, is, you remember this, the qualified, well qualified purchasers a different thing, but, uh, accredited investor rules.
Sure those numbers haven’t changed in 30 years. So, you know when they’re so
Joe: [00:39:00] arbitrary and so dumb. Well,
OG: they were, but they made more sense 30 years ago because 30 years ago was a hundred
Joe: percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, you gotta
OG: make $300,000 a year. Oh my God, that’s so much money. You know, you have to have a net worth of a million bucks.
Oh my gosh, that was so much money. That was 30 years ago. But it hasn’t scaled with inflation. If it scaled with inflation that 30 thou, that 300,000 would be a million of income. Now the million of net worth would be 7 million of net worth. And you go, oh, and think about what
Joe: investors think about what investors with that rule they were targeting.
Then if you think $7 million and up, what type of investor. Are they looking at, those are investors that can take different risks. Those are investors that are looking for something way different than you and I are looking for. Yeah. They aren’t necessarily looking for growth in their portfolio. They’re the people that dug on that, uh, documentary that you and I have talked about.
They’re buying art. Right? Right. They’re buying classic automobiles. I mean, they’re doing some of these obscure things in their portfolio that 99.9% of our stacker [00:40:00] audience has no business being in if you’re just trying to get to retirement successfully.
OG: Yeah. And they haven’t changed, haven’t scaled those numbers over a 30 year time horizon.
And so these companies, private equity firms or whatever are taking advantage of that and saying, well, now, I mean, not saying that $200,000, $300,000 is not a lot of money. ’cause it is, but it’s not the same as it was 30 years ago. A million dollars net worth is a good, it’s a great net worth. Right. But it’s not what it was 30 years ago.
It’s, it’s a different number. So they’re taking advantage of this and, and I think, I think ultimately if you go through your financial plan and you figure out, here’s how much I need to get to, here’s how much I have saved already. Here’s how much I’m putting in. Here’s my company match. Here’s my other investments, here’s how much I’m putting in those other things.
Now how much do I have to get to on the back end to be successful Now, what kinda rate of return do I need to solve for to get to where I want to go? Your rate of return number’s gonna be 7, 8, 9, 10%. If it’s 15, you have to adjust something different. You can’t, [00:41:00] there is no investment out there that gets 15 reliably.
Just doesn’t happen. Yeah. The chance you missing that mark becomes so, so, so big. Well, it’s just, it doesn’t happen in real life. Yeah. There is nothing that doesn’t exist. It’s not a possible thing. You have to say, well, I need to save a hundred dollars more and you retire a year later, or something like that.
And think about the
Joe: investments that do 7, 8, 9, 10%. Much easier to understand and as you and I have said a bajillion times here. You gotta understand just the basics of what, you don’t have to understand everything, you know, that’s why we have joy on today just to talk about the basics of getting into international investments, right?
You don’t gotta understand what’s going on in Poland, like we talked about on Monday, right? Don’t getter understand what’s going on in Indonesia, but you certainly, it, it’s not that hard to understand what international can do for you. But, but to get around the opaqueness of all this stuff, uh, is just, just garbage.
And man, if you can keep your portfolio pretty basic, maybe just a few funds that you get, how they’re working together, so, so, so much better than getting into this. [00:42:00]
OG: Well, and lemme just point something else out. If you were invested in US stocks, your s and p, large companies, small companies, whatever, right?
What happened in April from the 1st of April through the 8th of April, it went down 17% or something, right? I mean, like the market like. In a hurry. Okay. That’s the investment that averages 10 went down 10, 12, 15% in eight days. What do you think happens with the investment that averages 15? It has to be worse than that.
When you look at the history of the market and you go, well, hold on a second. My gosh. In 2008, the market 2007, the market was down 37%. Like holy crap, peak to trough. During the great recession, it was down 52%. Yeah, that’s the thing that gets you 10. Every once in a generation, it goes down by half [00:43:00] every five years it goes down by a third.
What do you think happens when you try to shoot for 20% returns?
Joe: I like the analogy you used earlier with credit cards and banks. So think about a bank offering 30. If you look at why do they offer 30, which I thought was a great point, it’s because some people are gonna give you zero. They’re gonna default on that credit card, they’re gonna wipe the slate clean, they’re gonna declare bankruptcy, so they’re not gonna get 30 from everybody.
There’s a level of risk. Now, the cool thing is Citibank and Chase can play the law of large numbers.
after show: Mm-hmm.
Joe: You and I don’t have the large number. We got one shot, right?
after show: Yeah.
Joe: So if I take 30% of my portfolio, I put in a private equity thing and it, it goes to zero. What’s your recourse? Where do you go? Yeah.
You’re forked. Yeah. Not bad. It’s not good. By the way, Jenny Johnson, let’s call her out. CEO of Franklin Templeton, she also thinks this is a great idea. Uh, she says private assets can boost returns and reduce portfolio volatility. Private real estate, for example, provides income and inflation protection and you know the reason she’s for it.
They’re gonna manage the private real [00:44:00] estate fund. The partnership’s going to offer, huh? It’s weird that she would be positive about this and get this, this is, this is the big one everybody. We’ve talked about how much we can’t stand target date funds labor department during the first Trump administration issued guidance.
Confirming the 401k plan can offer private equity in a diversified portfolio like your target date fund. So you’re like, oh, I don’t want anything in this. I don’t want to be in this. You might be in it whether you want to be in it or not. Og, if you just do that target date fund, again, another reason to just create your own target date, why, why would you not create your own target date fund?
I will link to this in the show notes. Just disgusting. It just gets so great. Uh, link to it in the show notes at Stacking Benjamins. Great reporting by Tzen. Again, as usual, over at the Wall Street Journal. Uh, let’s wander out in the back porch while I can, uh, like as a palate cleanser. Doug, we gotta do something better.
Uh, I’ll [00:45:00] begin, which is that we just at the end of May updated both of our guides. We updated the tax guide and we updated the HR guide. And for those guides, it’s stack you benjamins.com/benefits and stacking benjamins.com/tax guide. You just go to stacky benjamins.com/guides if you wanna look at them both.
We just gave you this month a lot more. Third party resources, almost like Kevin does with the 2 0 1. We pointed to specific episodes on stacking regimens. We pointed to specific resources which really we think are best in class for the different areas of tax planning and of HR managing your different benefits so that for people that wanna dig in deeper.
That’s what we did this month, of course, last month, last month’s update, we went into using your HSA well on the benefits guide, how to really dig into the HSA and on the tax guide. Not only do we add that, we also went into depth on backdoor Roth [00:46:00] IRAs, uh, AKA, uh, what do we call those now? Og Doug’s mom.
We don’t call him Doug’s mom in the guide, should, and the reason we came up with that for people who knew the show is I’m like, I hate the words Mega backdoor Roth. It just is so, it’s just a horrible phrase. It sounds really complicated. Here’s something that’s better. I said we need something better. And OG said, we’ll just call it Doug’s mom.
So maybe not great. But
OG: yeah, top five sb moments of all time,
Doug: which, which led to your entire theme of humor for the next four years. It just got ’em wound up. What else we got from the community? Doug? Uh, we got a great review from Robin. Robin, uh, Robin, H 9 1 8, I think. So. She drives a cool Porsche, one of my favorite podcasts.
I really enjoy this podcast. Joe keeps the conversation going with great energy and thoughtful questions. OG brings solid [00:47:00] financial insight with witty banter. Debatable and Doug keeps it real with humor and enthusiasm. Oh no. Which is exactly what my fifth grade teacher told my parents at parent-teacher conferences.
I bet. I love, I
Joe: bet.
Doug: I love like when they have to find something nice to say, which strangely came out as, I wish he’d shut up. Exactly. That is totally code for this kid is a class clown. Robin goes on to say, I love how they mix practical advice with fun, unexpected topics that don’t feel boring or repetitive.
If you’re looking for a personal finance podcast that’s smart, helpful, and hosted by people who feel genuinely approachable, this is it. Thanks
Joe: for that, Robin. Uh, although approaching Doug do it your own risk, I’ll just say, we’ll just say, alright, that’s gonna do for today, on Friday, we are shifting gears away from international.
Thanks for hanging out with us today and on Monday. If you didn’t hear on Monday, our deep dive into international investing, [00:48:00] you wanna go back and listen to that. Or if you have friends that really need to be better diversified, I hope these two episodes can help your friends do better. So you guys can all go to the Caribbean.
Let’s talk international destinations. You can go to the Mediterranean, you could go to,
Doug: does the Caribbean count as international? Let me, is it the Caribbean or the Caribbean?
Joe: I dunno, but yes it does. Although, no, it
OG: does anymore with the renaming. I think it’s just all part of us
Joe: with the res now that it’s all, it’s weird how that name
Doug: changes the second you get outside the United States.
We are now in international waters. It’s not like South America is an international, just because it has the word America in it doesn’t make it not international. There’s a lot of Americas. There is a lot of Americas. Yeah. But when, at least when you tell people, I like international travel and then you.
Hopped, you said, I’m going
Joe: to Cancun.
Doug: Yeah. A 38 minute flight to an island off the coast of Florida. I don’t know if that really qualifies. I’ll
Joe: still take it though. I’ll still take it. Yeah. [00:49:00] Good times everybody. Thank you so much, Doug. What are the things that should be on our to-do list today?
Doug: Well, Joe first take some advice from Joy Yang to diversify your investments.
Begin with your timeline and focus on broad themes instead of individual companies, you’ll decrease your risk while keeping your ability to earn from international stocks alive. Second, private equity, more like private trash. No need to get fancy in your 401k. Stick to the basics. But the big lesson turns out Joe’s mom was spying on me, spying on her.
She claims I took three chocolate chip cookies off the tray earlier. I said, ma. You know, my body’s a temple. I would never eat those cookies. It was Joe. I totally took those cookies. Thanks to Joy Yang for joining us. Today, you’ll find Joy’s work at Market Vectors ETFs. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stacking benjamin’s dot com.
This show is the property of [00:50:00] SB Podcast LLC, copyright 2025, and is created by Joe Saul Sea. Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome [email protected], along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.
Come say hello. Oh yeah. And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.[00:51:00]
after show: I am sure you guys
OG: have both had like. Not like proud parent moments. Like I, I think a proud parent moment’s. Like, oh, my kid caught the game-winning touchdown. I’m so proud of that. Or, you know, just like this cool thing that they did. Of course our middle kid, William is working on some, it’s kind of a project, but the class is kind of over.
It was an AP class and for those of you who have AP class kids, those classes end in early May because all of the AP [00:52:00] tests are taken at the same time across the country. I don’t think they’re literally the same time, because I don’t think, like in Hawaii they’re doing calculus tests at four in the morning, but, but it’s the same day in same day, local time or something.
So, so you know, all the calculus kids are taking calculus tests at 8:00 AM on Tuesday the 13th or something, but the class is still kind of going on. I think the class is over, but they gotta, you know, they just can’t let the kids run wild in the hallways. Anyway, so William is working on this project and he was, he asked me this question, he goes, do you know about the such and such of.
Group of people, and I dunno if it’s a tribe or whatever, but, um, and I said, oh, of course I did. Uh, why don’t you tell me what you know about them and make sure that you know what I know, you know, because I have no idea who the hell these people were. But he’s telling me this story about how they were, uh, community that was settled by the British and they hated the British.
I’m like, who doesn’t? And yawn. Yeah, there goes all the British fans, the colonizing British. Anyway, sorry. But, um, anyway, so he’s telling me this story and you know, like how they, they [00:53:00] wanted the British out and the head guy, the leader, the tribe leader, the shaman, whatever, this is how the story is told, is that he had a vision of how to get rid of the British, and it was, you had to do all these things.
Anyways, so he’s telling me this story. I’m like, okay, cool. That’s great to know. You know, like, I don’t care. He goes, let me show you what I did for my project. So he feeds into chat. GPT, it’s totally allowed for this class and for this project. So he feeds into chat. GPT, like all of the, like, I need to have a storyline of, do you know this story in chat?
Chat, GBTs? Of course I do. You know, I don’t,
Joe: but I’ll make one up.
OG: Yeah, exactly. Anyways, long story short, he starts feeding in these prompts, you know, and I, I, I feel like I’m pretty good at G Chat. I, no, no, 15 year olds are good at chat, GBT, like, they know what to do and he’s like, and this is how you do it, dad.
You gotta, you know, give it this. So he has this thing create like, uh, a slideshow of still images of [00:54:00] this event that happened, like this man waking up in his tent with a fire And William’s perspective is, and he writes this in there. He wants to see what the man would see. If he were waking up in his tent.
And so Cheche, he’s like, well, there’d probably a fire and there’d be some children sleeping nearby and you know, and he would have maybe a, an animal, a dog or something like that nearby. And, and so this picture, this still image is of someone looking, basically looking at their feet as they’re waking up and there’s like a little crackling fire right there.
And you see in the distance, you know, like in the corner there’s a couple of children sleeping and another person sleeping over there. And it’s what you would imagine it would look like. Right? Okay. Cool. Good picture. Very highly detailed picture. Then apparently there’s an AI tool where you could take this picture and it will loop, it’ll take the picture and go like, here’s what was right before it.
Here’s right, here’s logically what’s right before it, what’s right after it. To make it like a little vignette of [00:55:00] like a movie. It’s just five seconds of like, so in this case, it’s the guy sitting up and so you see like he’s looking up and then as he sits up the image, hands down to his feet. This ten second, five second, whatever.
It’s this whole storybook on this thing. He sat there for maybe an hour and 20 minutes and banged out this entire thing of like 20 pictures, all these video vignettes, and I’m like, how does this gotta cost money? Like, how do you, he goes, no, you just use a different email address to sign up and get the free trials every time.
He’s like, you get two every free trial. So I just have 10 email addresses to get this done. It was the most creative thing. William is very, very, very logical, and so to have him be able to contextualize this descriptive environment that he had just read about, basically, obviously with some help of chat GPT, but then to create that [00:56:00] and know what to ask and how to turn that into, it’s a whole new, it’s a whole new wave of the future.
I. We have the three of us can’t even comprehend right now. It’s, it’s mind boggling. Sam
Joe: Altman Ochi mentioned that the other day in an interview, said that, you know, the exciting thing he’s seeing with Jet GPT is coming from teenagers to your point. He goes, it’s almost like the early days of iPhone and, and, and smartphones.
Yeah. Where, you know, the 45-year-old is fumbling around, how do I use this thing? And the 15-year-old or 10 year old’s like pop, pop, pop,
OG: pop. Yeah. There’s seven steps ahead. It was so impressive. I was like, this is so wildly good. Like, I was
Joe: like, I don’t know if you had this feeling, because I always had that feeling when my kids did some amazing stuff, and that’s truly amazing.
But I was always like, how is this kid related to me? Like, I could
after show: have never done this
OG: in a million years. Well, I don’t have those gene for creative detail in any way, shape or form. My brother can look at a stack of Legos and go, oh, Eiffel Tower and make it. Doesn’t need [00:57:00] directions, doesn’t, you know, millennium Falcon and just does it, you know, like he knows what it looks like.
And I look at a box of Legos and I go, my feet hurt right? Already. You know, I, I wanna throw these in the trash. Um, please. So I think they got a little of that from Li, but yeah, it’s blown away by how, I always wonder
Joe: too though, how like kids from the same parents are so different. Do you wonder that as well?
Like, how are my kids so amazingly different when we made them all
Doug: the classic nature versus nurture
Joe: discussion? Yeah. I remember in high school, my twins, they had the same AP history teacher and he’s like, I love watching your twins, because they learn and they think completely differently. Like autumn, my daughter is very A equals B, B equals C, so therefore A must equal C.
And then Nick goes, oh, the answer c. And then, you know, the teacher looks at em and goes, why is it C? He goes, I, it just is. I, come on. It is. Yep.
OG: Yeah, skip to the end. I mean,
Joe: two kids and just even their learning patterns totally [00:58:00]
Doug: different. Yeah, those are my two. Exactly what you just described. What’s even more interesting on yours is that they’re like three and a half minutes apart.
Right. Seven, seven minutes apart, you know, and that’s even a crazier mystery. But what you just said is exactly right. I remember when my boys who are two and a half ish years apart, we would sit at the dinner table and I would just sort of quiz them on different facts or trivia or shocking, right? Um, and sometimes it would be a math related question or I would kind of create a, a little business scenario.
OG always uses ice cream shops. I always used to use a bike, a bike shop, and the exact same thing would happen. My oldest Tucker would, you know, just do the math. You could see him doing the math and he would take. 20 seconds or whatever it was, and the fin turned would just spit it out and could not answer why.
But he didn’t have the self-confidence at a young age to spit it out. He would wait for his older brother because, you know, it’s that whole birth order thing.
OG: He’s like, we’re [00:59:00] waiting.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
OG: Well you, you go ahead and do the math
Doug: and while mom and dad are distracted by looking at you and if you’re coming up with an answer, I can throw my carrots on the floor and give them to the dog.
But yeah, the same thing. He just didn’t know why he knew the answer. He just got it. And it took so long to convince him, dude, you might be the smartest one in the house. Just step up. You just need to step up and have the confidence. And that took a long time for him to develop.
Joe: Well, he is your kid. I mean,
OG: it’s a really important thing, I think, and what we’ve decided to do years ago.
We’ll see if it works. I think it will is to really let the kids like lean into the stuff that they’re really good at and then just be okay with the be okay with the B. You know, we don’t want C’s and D’s, although I know that that happens, but you know, high school’s not that challenging, in my opinion, to not be able to pull off a B or a c plus if you need to, you know, type of thing for our kids.
Anyway, yesterday in this, in this whole thing was going on. William came down [01:00:00] afterward and he says, he goes, I have a question dad. I have a B in English, which is not his favorite subject. He’s like, if I do the last two pieces of homework and get a hundred percent on them, I still have a B. If I don’t do them and I get zeros, I still have a b.
Should I do them? And I was like, you know my answer to that. He’s like, so I don’t have to do it. I’m like, you’re right. You don’t have to do it. This is the system they built. They built the system. You know, you’re just playing the game. Don’t
Doug: hate the play. I hate
OG: the game that they laid out. I said, the only challenge, of course, is your teacher could argue you didn’t complete everything, so they’re gonna wait on it.
He’s like, and then Lisa’s in the background, she goes, you should try your hardest on everything. And I’m like, no, that’s not true. If you’re just getting a B. If you’re a B student, just be a B student and have more life. You know what I mean? Like why? Why stress over being a B plus student? Like just take your B, just enjoy life taking my being
Joe: and going home.
OG: But do the [01:01:00] things like, to your point with your kids where they just go, this is the answer. Like I’m, I’m good at this.
Joe: Do more of that. Spend
OG: your time on that. More of that. Get better at those things that you’re really, really, really super good at. I think if we spent and gave kids a lot of grace around, you know what, you’re just not a science kid.
That’s cool. You have to have some cursory knowledge of that. So we’re gonna make you take, you know, biology and chemistry and, you know, you gotta know that this stuff exists in the universe, but you’re really good at literature, you are doing that. So anyways, it’s the end of the school year, so we’re super excited to, to see what the summer brings.
Joe: So I’m just wondering, is he gonna be the next, now is he like, uh, Francis Ford, uh, Bannerman with his new movie Making Skills?
OG: Uh, he has a surprising amount of creativity, so he’s very analytic also, but the creativity is really profound. He, he has cre there’s so many other things I could tell you guys offline, but, um, he’s very quick witted,
Joe: more companies you scam [01:02:00] by using.
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