What if the most important part of your retirement plan had nothing to do with your 401(k), IRA, or stock portfolio? In this episode of The Stacking Benjamins Show, Joe Saul-Sehy and OG are joined by filmmakers Pete Davis and Rebecca Davis, creators of the thought-provoking documentary Join or Die. They explore how community connection, not cash, may be the ultimate retirement strategy.
Drawing inspiration from the late political scientist Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), the Davises reveal why joining groups—book clubs, church choirs, rec leagues, neighborhood associations—might be more essential to your long-term well-being than your asset allocation.
Together with Joe and OG, they unpack the data behind social decline, the healing power of showing up, and what the film Join or Die teaches us about leading a richer life beyond the numbers. Of course, Mom’s Neighbor Doug pops in with trivia that proves he belongs (at least to this show).
Whether you’re on the path to retirement or simply looking for deeper purpose, this episode will make you think differently about how you stack your most valuable resource: time.
- Why joining a club may be just as critical to retirement as saving for it
- What Join or Die reveals about America’s shrinking social networks
- How loneliness affects physical and financial health—and how to fight it
- Why your “portfolio of community” might be the highest-yield investment you ever make
- Ways to build meaningful connections now—even if you don’t feel like a “joiner”
- Pete and Rebecca Davis share behind-the-scenes stories from making Join or Die
- Joe and OG reflect on what gives life meaning after the 9-to-5 ends
- Surprising data on the link between social capital and financial confidence
- Doug delivers a trivia challenge about famous clubs (and less-famous neighbors)
👟 Your Challenge This Week: Sign up. Show up. Speak up. Whether it’s your local book club, PTA, pickleball team, or town council meeting—belonging starts with one yes.
💬 “Retirement planning isn’t just about money—it’s about meaning.” Tune in and learn how to build a life you won’t want to retire from.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Mentors: Pete and Rebecca Davis
Big thanks to Pete and Rebecca Davis for joining us today. To learn more about Peter and Rebecca, visit JOIN OR DIE: A film about why you should join a club.
Our Headline
- Meet the ‘Stealthy Wealthy’ Who Make Their Money the Boring Way (Wall Street Journal)
Doug’s Trivia
- What is the largest service organization on earth?
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
- 🎥 Join or Die documentary by Pete and Rebecca Davis
- JOIN OR DIE: A film about why you should join a club (Host a screening)
- 📘 Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
- 🎙️ Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing by Pete Davis
- What the Happiest Retirees Know: 10 Habits for a Healthy, Secure, and Joyful Life by Wes Moss
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday when we’re talking decumulation with three top minds from the retirement planning community.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Retirement 101: Planning, Risks, and Smooth Sailing (SB1696)
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] bit: We are back. We are back. We are getting Doug back, and we’re the three best friends that anybody could have. We are the three best friends that anyone could have. We are the three best friends that anyone could have, and we’ll never, ever, ever, ever, ever leave each other. We’re the. [00:00:27] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor. Duggan, are you ready to find your best retirement living? What does a successful life look like? A new documentary shares an unexpected answer. The key to living well might not be what you think on today’s show. We’ll meet the creators of the film, join or Die, Pete and Rebecca Davis, and speaking of living your best life, remember that advice.
Follow your passion. In our headline segment, we’ll shine a light on some people who ditch that advice and still found big stacks of Benjamins and you know you want it. So I’m happy to deliver a case of today’s best fresh new trivia. And now two guys who thought a hot market was a real estate term, not the driveway at noon.
It’s Joe and oh,
[00:01:34] Joe: that’s what it’s turning into. It is getting hot in Texas. Hey everybody, welcome to the hottest podcast on Personal finance, the Stacky Benjamin Show, and, uh, not just the driveway. Og, that’s hot. Holy cow. Welcome to Summer in Texas. Huh? Air. [00:01:59] bit: Oh, [00:02:02] OG: what, [00:02:03] Joe: what, what are we doing? [00:02:07] OG: Huh? It’s getting hot in here. [00:02:09] Joe: Who’s getting hot in here? But don’t, isn’t there a light in there that’s getting hot in here? It’s to take off all your clothes. Isn’t that a No, that’s, that’s the good part. I don’t want that. I don’t want that hanging out with you guys [00:02:20] Doug: around the table.No. Well, guess what? When you guys walk out, I’m already
[00:02:23] OG: not wearing any clothes [00:02:24] Doug: in Texas. When you walk outside on asphalt, do you just, do you leave footprints like, like Neil Armstrong did on the moon? [00:02:31] OG: No. No, Doug, you don’t walk on asphalt. You just don’t go it. [00:02:35] Doug: We have no idea because you don’t the what the grass is for.It’s like the floor is lava
[00:02:39] Joe: everywhere in Texas, everywhere is, if you see concrete or you see asphalt, you just don’t go there. Yeah. You know what, we also, uh, don’t want it to be awkward down here if we’ve, it’s getting hot in here because Pete and Rebecca Davis are here. Imagine if we Oh, no, no. That was, that was white Doug.That was my nipple. That was white. That was the whitest. Were we blinded the hell? Yeah. Pete and Rebecca Davis coming down here and we don’t want it weird for them when they come down here because they’re the documentarians behind this great, great show that I watched a few weeks ago called Join or Die, and I’m so happy that they could join us.
I was thrilled ’cause it was funny. I was watching the preview for OG and, and Cheryl’s nuding me in the movie theater. She’s like, they are singing off your song sheet. The key to a successful retirement is actually, even if you are a, an introvert, it might be different than you think it is, and we’ll chat with them.
Pete and Rebecca created this movie, join or Die with the subtitle, a film about why you should join a club actually, and it’s way deeper than you think that it is. It is a film that follows the story of legendary social scientist Robert Putnam. Pete was one of Bob Putnam’s students and learned a ton from him.
And the things that, uh, he learned from Mr. Putnam who had a book that in the late nineties was a huge book called Bowling Alone and has been honored by several presidents. The Davises, who were about to meet, who made this. Pete, of course, as I mentioned, was a student of Roberts. He’s a writer, a civic advocate, and he’s the author of Dedicated The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing.
His sister Rebecca, has been a producer for HBO Vice, A and e and others. She was the senior producer with NBC News for nearly a decade. So between Rebecca’s ability to frame a story and Pete’s firsthand knowledge of the topic at hand, man, we got people that are gonna talk about. Why, why, why? It’s so important that you have a little more than a hobby when you get to retirement.
We’re gonna hear from Pete and Rebecca next, but before them we have a couple sponsors to make sure we can keep on keeping on and you don’t pay a dime for any of this. Goodness. We’re gonna hear from them. And then with notes on their new film Join or Die, which you can watch on Netflix. Pete and Rebecca Davis.
And I am super happy they’re here with me today. Pete and Rebecca Davis are here. How are you two?
[00:05:32] Rebecca: Doing great. Glad to be here. [00:05:33] Joe: Thanks so much for having us. I’m so happy I found out I was telling all of our stacker family about me catching up two years late to this party. So [00:05:43] Rebecca: better late than never. And I think the themes of the film, you know, I think have just continued to be more relevant every month that passes.And so we welcome you into the Joiner Die family.
[00:05:56] Joe: Well, thanks Rebecca. We had Scott Galloway on who I’m sure the two of you are familiar with, and he’s also singing off your song sheet, talking about how. While we’re all yelling at each other on social media, we’re not paying attention to our local institutions, which is wrecking our democracy.Well, for our stackers and for the two of you, I’m gonna try to do two things here at once. Number two is the themes are clearly important for our stackers. Number one, not just for the communities that we live in, but also for our own longevity and our own happiness levels. But also, I love talking about what people are passionate about.
And clearly the two of you have a lot of passion around this topic. And having just screened the film, there’s so much love and care and expertise that went into the making of it. So I also want to kind of do the behind the scenes making of it, and we’re gonna go back and forth between the two of those.
But let’s just start out from the idea generally. I’m guessing this was originally
[00:06:53] Pete: must have been Pete’s idea. Is that true? It was. Both of our ideas, you know, it came out of these two streams that we were experiencing. You know, on my side I was. In Bob’s class, Bob Putnam is the figure at the center of this film, the researcher about community in America.And you know, my stream was basically, I had this class that changed my life, which was that I was in school as this political science major. I thought politics and democracy was all about what happens in Washington. And what Bob Putnam taught me and taught so many people through his book, bowling Alone, is that the most important thing happening in our democracy is not what’s happening in Washington, even though that’s very important.
It’s what’s happening in ordinary neighborhood and community organizations all across the country. And then meanwhile, my sister Rebecca, was traveling all around the country seeing the symptoms of community decline. And Rebecca, if you wanna say more about that, because Rebecca, were you with NBC News at the time?
[00:07:50] Rebecca: Yeah. So in 2017 when uh, Pete and I approached Bob together about the possibility of doing this documentary, which is about eight years ago now, I was working as a news producer and camerawoman for NBC News. So as Pete mentioned, I was based in New York, but every few days I was hopping on an airplane and north, south, east, west, rural, urban, seeing all the different types of ways people are in community in America.And no matter where I was. Touching down the conversation was hitting on these similar themes, uh, you know, that Bob addressed in his famous book, bowling Alone. I was just talking to a lot of folks that felt like things were off in their community. They felt like the daily rhythms of their life were not fulfilling them in the way that they had hoped.
And, uh, at that point in 2017, we were coming up on the 20 year anniversary of Bowling Alone. And so this project, you know, was a chance Pete and I hope to revisit that famous book, especially for anyone that maybe didn’t wanna sit down and curl up with a 500 page social science text. Although we do encourage folks who watch the film and are interested to, you know, go deeper, not just with Bowling Alone, but many of the incredible books that Bob wrote and the other experts in the film.
So yeah, we approached Bob, it was his last year of teaching, so he was about to retire. So there was kind of this now or never moment where we were like, I. You know, we really gotta get in touch with Bob and see if we can capture his last semester of teaching and capture him in this moment. You know, where we thought he might be ready to kind of, you know, look back.
Where are we at almost 20 years later.
[00:09:25] Joe: I wanna dive into first the premise, but even before we do that, there’s also just the part then, Rebecca, sticking with you for a second about the fact this is gonna be a documentary, which means, you know, you have important things that you wanna say, but there also has to be a stylistic way that you present this.How hard was it to kind of storyboard this project out? Because for people who haven’t seen the movie yet, you guys have wonderful animations, you have live interviews. Some of them were a person’s in one place. Others, you’re out in a field like with members of a church in Michigan. You’re out in a field walking around, you’re following people around towns, waxahatchee, uh, Texas and other places.
And then you’ve got like old movie clips, like I feel like there’s gotta be Rebecca, this entertainment value that kind of keeps people attached. So we get this bigger message.
[00:10:17] Rebecca: Yeah, I mean I think that’s the challenge anytime you’re working in translating text into a visual language, you know, I think at one point Pete and I joked, we tried to narrow down Bob’s graphs and we narrowed them down to about a hundred graphs.And I said, this movie’s gonna be a probably a hundred, you know, I think maybe 10 finally made it in the film of probably thousands that we could have chosen from. And
[00:10:41] Pete: that’s probably the most graphs in a film [00:10:46] Rebecca: in years. So, but yeah, I mean, you know, that was the challenge. How do we create a visual language and translate social science, text and data into film form?How do we condense these complex academic ideas? And I think that’s where, you know, definitely Pete’s background in studying government and social science definitely came into play as we partnered up. And then of course, you know, we had an incredibly talented team around us that was able to realize this.
Challenge. So we had this awesome animator, uh, Mark Lopez of Silkworm Studios out of Austin, Texas. Great editor Chad Irvin, who once joked, if you got together with another American in the last 200 years, you were fair game archival footage to, you know, so his job was really, you know, like with the graphs, how do we winnow down with just so much incredible,
[00:11:37] Pete: yeah.Because usually you do a documentary about, you know, Roberto Clemente or something and there’s a certain amount of clips of him doing interviews. But if you’re doing a documentary and you’re trying to like get the most out of the available clips of that one person, and you know, we did that with the Bob side of the story, but with the community side of the story, clubs are everywhere.
There are a million clips of Americans getting together. So it was often a challenge of, okay, we’re talking about the history of dinner parties or the history of picnics or the history of the Qis Club. And then you go and you try to find the clip that really gets the emotion of. Reviving that idea of what life was like at a time when we had peak civic connection.
How did you
[00:12:19] Joe: decide to put like fifties and forties movie clips in here too? [00:12:24] Rebecca: I mean, that one, I think we have to give credit to our editor, Chad Irvin, both to him and to Mark Lopez. You know, we told him like, get weird. We wanna have fun with this film even while we’re making our way through some very serious material. [00:12:40] Joe: Let’s dive into that serious material. You decide to start with that group in Waxahatchee, Texas that I was talking about before the Oddfellows Club. Pete, can you explain a little bit about the Odd Fellows? [00:12:51] Pete: Yeah. You know, in American history, it used to be very normal to be part of a large, federated, fraternal organization.What a federated organization means is it’s an organization that has local chapters, state chapters, national chapters. What a fraternal organization means is it’s mostly just about getting together and connecting with each other. And the most famous in world history is the Masons. We have all these, there’s the animal clubs, the Elks, the Lions, the Qis, the Rotary Li, uh, Rotary’s, more of a service club in Kiwanis, but Elks, lions, moose.
All the animals. All the animals. And the odd fellows were the second huge mass membership org in the United States after the Masons. And the reason we wanted to focus on this one chapter in Waxahatchee is we wanted to find a chapter of a mass membership fraternal organization that was turning around the decline trends.
Because the biggest problem with federated fraternal organizations is. They’re graying. Um, not a lot of young people joining, less people in each of them. This is what Bob studied in his work. That’s what the bowling alone phenomenon is. And we wanted an example of someone turning it around. And so that’s why we found this group.
We had heard from someone that all the odd fellows around the country knew about Wax A 80, which had turned things around. And so we wanted to focus on them and we specifically wanted to start the film with them because we wanted to show people how deep these groups had gotten into people’s lives. And so we wanted to start with one person sharing how deep their relationship with their club was deep to the level that they had tattoos running down their arm of their club logo, and they had a whole building that was devoted to their club.
We wanted to enchant people. With the idea of don’t you want this? Um, this is amazing. So that was how we started with the odd fellas
[00:14:46] Joe: as a viewer, I found him to be a quirky individual. You start off with him looking through like a peephole, like it’s a secret organization and you know, almost like I’m going to a speakeasy when I’m going in.And so I think it’s kinda weird and wonderful, especially to your point, Pete, as he’s going through, you know, showing his tattoos. But then it’s funny, one of the last things he says really widens it. ’cause I’m like, okay, being in a club’s a little weird. ’cause this guy is a little wonderfully weird. But then he said, I’m not really a joiner.
And ever since my brother died 20 years ago, I just felt this need for community. And I, I really feel like Rebecca, all of us have felt that. Yeah. I think more and more, even though we’re connected more and more.
[00:15:29] Rebecca: Yeah. What I hear in what you’re saying too, this weirdness is more like. They’ve built a culture inside our culture.And so it would be similar to encountering, you know, you go travel somewhere and you talk to someone else and they have a whole other language identity traditions and you might say, oh, that culture’s a little strange. I’m not familiar with it. And I think that is the aspect that made these federated societies that Pete was just speaking to such a deep part of people’s life because it was not just, I’m ticking the box to go do my volunteer work and put this line on my resume.
They were fully building a new culture of membership and culture gets at the core of what it means to be human. And I think for our groups that wanna start kind of rebuilding, looking at what type of culture are you building around your community? I mean, even, you know, we see that around podcasts. You start to kind of have your own.
Little words that you use, little songs that you sing, and all of that is important and adds to meaning.
[00:16:39] Joe: Pete, in one piece, to Rebecca’s point, you go on the road, you’re speaking with a union organizer, and she’s talking about how in many cases these people have nothing in common besides the fact that a boss picked them all.And yet Pete, the shared culture really does something that helps us with democracy. How does a club help
[00:17:00] Pete: us with democracy? Yeah. There’s so many aspects to this. So one is that you learn the skills of democracy at a club. So you learn how to give a speech, you learn how to run a meeting, you learn how to get people to show up.You learn how to come to a decision together. That’s one aspect. How to
[00:17:18] Rebecca: disagree, importantly, [00:17:20] Pete: yes. And that’s a huge part of it. You learn how to have fights and resolve them. [00:17:24] Joe: That is interesting because late in that film, because I thought this was really important, was because we don’t join clubs as much now.We just show up and yell at each other. And I really like the fact that you, you subtly make this point that maybe if you join a club you can show up and disagree with somebody in a, in a much more helpful
[00:17:43] Pete: way. We aren’t born with the skills to be able to navigate tense situations. We have to learn them.And you don’t learn them from a textbook. You learn them from doing, which is, I want our birdwatching club to be about this. No, I want our birdwatching club to be about that. And then you have to figure it out and maybe figuring it out is. Calmly creating two branches of the birdwatching club. Maybe figuring it out is figuring out a compromise.
Whatever it is, it’s muscles that you build up. And then the second aspect of this, hold
[00:18:11] Joe: on, before you get to the second aspect, I just have to say, I can’t believe you talked about birdwatching clubs because, just a quick aside, I went on a birdwatching tour one time on a boat around the Channel Islands.Yes. And Cheryl and I thought this was gonna be a low key thing, Pete, they, they had to get everybody around in a circle and they had to say, okay, we have three experts with walkie talkies and when they see a bird, everybody’s gonna get a chance. And I’m like, okay, well that’s fine. This is bird watching.
And you know what they said, Pete? They literally said, this can’t be like
[00:18:44] Pete: last time. Well, that. Is a moment of cultivation, a moment when culture is created. Because what creates a culture, A culture is a set of experiences that you learn a new response to, right? So you know, oh, remember that time that everything went to heck, you know, ’cause of the birds.We all wanted the birds. Now we have this practice. That we all understand together, and slowly over time, all of those practices equals people really knowing how to do something together. So that’s one aspect of it. You individually learn how to do something, and you collectively learn how to do something, and while you’re doing it, here’s the final aspect that helps with democracy.
You. Get connected with people who are different than you and form new identities about the ways that you are the same. So in all the groups that we feature in this movie, there’s a bowling league. There are rich people and low income people in that bowling league, but they’re connecting right now over bowling and having a cross class interaction.
There’s a. Gig workers advocacy group. There are people from all different races, religions and politics, but they’re all working together on fighting for better safety and higher wages for gig workers. What you do is you come into contact through clubs of people who are different than you learn that they’re real.
Learn about what you might have misunderstood and build understanding amongst each other. And the next time that you’re back with people that are similar to you and someone says, oh, I hate all those people over there who are like that, you can say, actually, I know Gary from church, or I know Gary from the Birdwatching Club, or I know him from the union, or the party or whatever, or the neighborhood block party that we were at.
And actually, you know, not everyone’s like that. You don’t know all the nuances of this, that type of stuff. And this shows up in social science studies, those little connections. Are the stuff that together form our social fabric that makes everything work better in our society.
[00:20:46] Joe: I love a point that you make, that the ability to be upwardly mobile.They talk about you are the five people that you’re around. In some neighborhoods you have no ability to be around these five people that might change your life and being in a club can really make that happen. I wanna do some definition time here for a second, but first I, and I wanna take this from a clip in the film that I’d like to play on this program.
Obviously we talk a lot about building capital, about Stacking Benjamins, right? About building money and diversifying a portfolio. But you talk about another type of capital, and here is Dr. Robert Putnam talking about these two different types of capital.
[00:21:26] bit: I mean, the core idea of social capital is so simple.I’m, I’m almost embarrassed to say it. Sometimes it is that social networks have value. Physical capital is simply some tool, like a screwdriver, and so you invest in buying screwdrivers and you can repair more bicycles more quickly. Now, economists invented the term human capital to refer to training and education.
So just as you can invest in a screwdriver and repair more bicycles more quickly, you could go to auto mechanic school and learn a lot, and that education would make you more productive. Social capital simply says the same, you with the same tools and the same training can get more done if you work in an organization or you live in a community where there are productive connections with other people.
[00:22:20] Joe: Uh, and everybody high fives each other. By the way, congratulations to your editors again, Rebecca on the on the sound clips. Everybody could hear the sound clips in that piece, like just keeping us awake as you’re explaining this. [00:22:33] Rebecca: Yeah, totally. And you know, Bob likes to joke about that clip in this context of, you know, social capital that you just played.It’s the one type of capital when you spend it, it actually grows. So unlike, you know, when dollars are flying out of our account and you know, and we’re buying stuff. When we’re spending our social capital building those connections in our community, we’re putting more money in the social capital and it’s increasing.
And what that looks like practically from our lived experience in the world is it means if I lose my job, I’ve got five people that I can call up and say, Hey, are you hiring down at your shop down the street? Instead of trying to just send a resume out to the internet. And you know, we all know one of those experiences is a lot easier to navigate than the other when you got friends looking out for you who have your back.
[00:23:23] Joe: Bob’s work. Pete is all built on this fact that we used to join Bowling leagues. Now we don’t join the way that, the way that we used to. What’s a reason for that? That we stopped joining things. Do you think? [00:23:34] Pete: Is it social media? What’s so interesting in Bob’s findings is that he wrote, I. The book Bowling Alone in 2000.So that’s before the iPhone. That’s before Facebook. That’s before Instagram. He wrote the article that became the book in 1995 where hardly anyone even had email. So these declines have been happening since the sixties. They were definitely accelerated. By our hyper digitalization of the last 20 years.
It has only gotten worse since he wrote the book. The book did not succeed yet in turning the trends around, but maybe in this coming decade we can, but things started going down mid-century. There is not one culprit we can point to. There’s some things he found on maybe television was part of the story.
We know that people still watch five hours of TV a day. That’s time not spent, not going to a Rotary Club meeting. We know there was something generational about this, which is the people who were joiners 50 years ago, if they’re still alive, they’re still joiners. So it didn’t happen over the course of a lifetime.
They just didn’t pass joining habits onto their kids. And each successive generation is less and less of a joiner. But we know it started way before the internet, and it might have contributed to the fact that the internet accelerated it because we designed an internet in, for the most part, we designed social media that was not necessarily about joining up in person because we already had a individualist culture by the time most of these apps were created.
And this gets into a really important thing, which is the way we design our spaces. Affects how many relationships we’re building with them. So for example, we have all this information right now about everything all around the world, but it’s still really hard to find out which clubs are in your town to join.
Right? You know, it’s easier to get some giant opinion out to someone halfway across the world than it is to like meet your neighbor. And so we are always promoting, we need to build civic, localized technology. It’s not technology good or technology bad, it’s we need to use these tools to promote this ideal of local community and connection.
I.
[00:25:46] Joe: It’s so amazing. I belong to a group here in Texarkana that builds walking trails and another group called Leadership Texarkana, which brings local leaders together. And it was amazing. A few years ago, they realized that the only people that were reviewing our restaurants in town were outsiders. As they came down I 30, the locals that know the local restaurants, Pete, were not recommending places.So everybody was going to Outback Steakhouse and to Olive Garden, and nobody was going to Verona, which is a great place to eat downtown.
[00:26:19] Rebecca: Yeah. And were those reviewers getting paid by the Outback Steakhouse? That was the other question that the reporter and me is. Curious to hear. [00:26:27] Joe: Good point. That’s a great point.So we got together as a community and encouraged each other to start. And now you go onto Yelp and you see some better reviews of the local places, which helps our town. But I feel like that makes us think, you know, that we wanna skip to the chase and go to national stuff because the local stuff is so boring.
And yet, Rebecca, when you’re talking to these people at this wonderful church in Michigan, like everything’s happening in this field, not on a national level. I.
[00:26:57] Rebecca: Totally. I mean, how many times do you hear people say, you gotta come to my town. We’ve got this great Starbucks. You know? And the other thing I also say to people is that Starbucks letting you host a, a gallery show of a local artist, is it letting you put up a poster for your club meeting on a community poster board?And I don’t mean to call them out specifically, but just, you know, sure. As an example of a national chain that most of us have. And that is the type of critical eye I think that all of us need to be taking to businesses as they come into our communities. And if they are not serving that dual purpose of providing whatever service they’re providing to the community as far as, you know, the food they’re offering or, or other service, but are they also adding to the community in some way?
Are they putting their name on the back of the little league t-shirts and making sure the little league field is maintained? If they aren’t, you know, we as citizens of those communities. I need to say, you know, maybe this might not be a great home for you.
[00:27:58] Joe: Halfway through the film, you switch from, you can help your democracy by joining a club to specifically what we’ve been talking about today.No, you can really help yourself. You found a woman named, uh, Julian Holt Lunds stat. Could you tell me who this woman is?
[00:28:17] Rebecca: Yeah, so she was one of the advisors on the surgeon General Vivic Murthy, who Surgeon General at the time were working on the film. Uh, she was one of the advisors on a major report he put out in his time in office on this loneliness and isolation crisis where he was really trying to bring to the center of the health conversation, not just our physical health.You know, in the past, surgeon generals have taken on things like smoking campaigns and making sure you wear your seatbelts things for our physical body. And Dr. Murthy in his time at in Office. Really in partnership with the research of Julianne Holt, Lunds dad, who’s, who’s based out of BYU. Her research really looks at the physical impacts of isolation and finds that being isolated is as big of a health risk to you as those things that you know, we all know well about smoking, not eating right, not exercising, and through her work, you know, she’s really trying to lift up the importance of getting involved in community for our physical health.
[00:29:20] Joe: You have this statistic, Pete, I think the chance of dying goes down in a given year by what? 50% just by joining [00:29:26] Pete: 50%, just by joining one group that’s, uh, from some of these public health and loneliness researchers. Bob has been citing this for a long time. Here’s the way to think about it. You know, when you have social connections, these are the people that tell you to take your meds.These are the people that help invite you to their running club. These are the people that help you in recovery to get off. Drugs. These are the people that notice a mole on the back of your neck because you don’t see the back of your neck that often, but your friends do and then tell you you should get that checked out at a dermatologist for cancer Also, you know, we know we’re starting to see that like cortisol levels go down and if you want to get evolutionary EVO bio about this, we know that as we evolved as humans, we evolved in community and so people are starting to understand that actually it’s not that our default state is isolated and community is a nice to have.
Our default state is in community and when we are away from it. Our body senses that something is lacking and that causes stress to our body. I
[00:30:28] Joe: feel like we all felt that, and you guys point this out, we felt this during COVID. Yeah. You really felt it during COVID. [00:30:33] Rebecca: Yeah. I mean, and you know, COVID was a surprise to us.Like I mentioned, we started the film in 2017, so three years into production on this film. Suddenly we get hit with this surprise, massive global. Social experiment of can we just live life on Zoom and through a computer? And I don’t think any of your listeners need us to share any data to know that the happy hour on Zoom stopped being fun about one month into 19 pandemic, and no one wants.
To wave to their grandparent on their birthday through a screen. Either
[00:31:06] Joe: you’ve got a video of everybody saying Happy Birthday to Bob Online. Yes. Which is so depressing. [00:31:11] Pete: We weren’t able to film during the pandemic Bob’s on the older side, and so we didn’t want to have any risk for him, and we sent him a camera and said, record some of your pandemic life during this period.So
[00:31:21] Rebecca: yeah, Rosemary Putnam deserves a crew credit in that one for, for your camera work on this project. [00:31:28] Joe: I can’t imagine that I, I’ll save that for episode number two where we talk about how that affected your schedule. I can’t imagine like, oh my God, you get halfway through the project and that hit. [00:31:38] Rebecca: Yeah.But I think it’s brought that conversation that much more to the forefront of people’s hearts. So as we’re touring the film around, people are really ready to have this conversation and to figure out what we want our world to look like, you know, in these years ahead.
[00:31:52] Joe: I love the doubt halfway through the film that, did we get it all wrong?And then talking about, well, maybe parts are wrong, but I think we got it mostly right. I thought that was exciting, but then the fact that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and I’m not gonna even really talk about that. But the cool thing is, is that we’ve been here before and you do a great job of pointing it out.
You don’t have to do anything new. We truly just go back to where we were before.
[00:32:14] Pete: You know, there’s all these nuances. You could make a film about community plus blank community in schools, community and hospitals, community and business, all of this stuff. But it really comes down to a simple thing. And we said, just join something.And if you’re looking for something to create, we’re really into this idea of just do what you love together. Just ask yourself the question, what are you doing alone? You could be doing together. Are you celebrating alone? You could be celebrating together? Are you dealing with neighborhood problems alone?
You could deal with neighborhood problems and come up with neighborhood ideas together. We’re all sitting at home alone watching streaming services. Hopefully you’re watching Join or Die on Netflix, but let’s revive a culture of, I’m really into this Jerry Seinfeld quote, going to the movies is part of the movie, the Popcorn.
The building, the other people, the conversations in the hallway afterwards, our stackers know how much I feel about this. Yes. I’d rather see it in the theater. Yes. And that’s part of community. And we’ve actually been telling a lot of institutions that are wondering about their future. Have you thought about pivoting to community?
If you have a local newspaper, why not have parties every month to celebrate the release of all the issues of the past month? If you’re a local library, so many libraries are not just collections of books, they’re becoming community spaces. If you’re a local theater, start the Tuesday Horror Club. If you’re a local business, think about ways that you can also be a place to host community events about what you’re doing.
You know, even podcasts. Tell everyone, here’s an idea. We’ve been pushing on podcasts. Have your listeners meet up in chapters with each other every so often?
[00:33:51] Joe: Oh yeah. We’re doing that now and it is really cool to see our stackers getting together. We’ve got a great robust group in Minneapolis, St. Paul.Shout out to you guys possibly looking at starting one in the Seattle area. We’ve been having talks there like, that’s cool.
[00:34:04] Pete: One shout out to St. Paul. Uh, three of the highest social capital states in America are Vermont, Minnesota, and Utah. And so we always get a lot of Minnesotans who really understand community [00:34:15] Joe: well.There you go. Stackers, Minnesota stackers. That’s your shout out. And everybody knows how much I love Vermont and just the beauty in Utah, the film, which clearly everybody can tell. I hate, I can’t stand this film. It’s, it’s, I love this film so much. It’s called Join or Die. And as I told the two of you beforehand, we’re even talking about doing a public screening in Texarkana, which will be great because our local Kiwanis group wants this.
All of our local groups, our local rotary group wants it.
[00:34:42] Rebecca: Yeah, anyone who wants to host a screening, I think we’re up to about 400 community screenings as of this week. But if you had to join your dive film.com, we’ve got a host a screening button right there, and so you can head right to our website and request a screening to come to your town. [00:34:57] Joe: That’s awesome. And we’ll link to that in the show notes because I would love to see communities do that. And lastly, I know one of the things going back to the pandemic, did you guys see that meme that said, uh, I finished Netflix. You clearly haven’t finished Netflix until you seen join or day. I allowed [00:35:13] Rebecca: cry at that one.Yeah.
[00:35:16] Joe: Rebecca, Pete, thanks for educating our stackers on the importance of, uh, joining. I super appreciate you. Thank you for having us on. Love what you’re doing. [00:35:29] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And how about Pete and Rebecca Davis? Huh? Joining a club actually sounds like a lot of fun. I know some of our stackers get together in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and we’ve got new groups coming together in Boston and Seattle as well. Great news though, while forming new money groups is a capital idea.See what I did there. Joining. Joining one of the many great service organizations is not only helpful for your community, but also can get you involved. Here’s today’s question. What’s the largest service organization on earth? I’ll be back right after I help these neighborhood kids with their service project.
It’s always fun to help the younger generation.
Hey there, stackers. I’m neighborhood helper guy and man always lending a hand or a foot. If you aren’t nice to your elders. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. These neighborhood kids, man, apparently for this amazing service project, they have to go out around midnight with some toilet paper and celebrate some of the unsuspecting neighbors before they wake up.
Man, it’s just inspiring, isn’t it? In this ceremony, I guess you run the toilet paper like through the trees and bushes around their house. They said it’s a great way to highlight different houses around the neighborhood, really bring attention to the best people in the neighborhood. They’re such good kids.
While these guys are forming their own service organization, there are many that already exist like the Rotary and Kiwanis today. I asked the question though, what service organization is the largest one on Earth? The answer, the Lion’s Club. And now here come two guys ready to growl into the microphones.
Joe and OG growl the lions growl. RI think they, I think they rower. They roar. Roar. They roar. Rower. Is that how you pronou pronounce it? Sounds sometimes. Especially when OGs grumpy. It sounds like he’s growling into the microphone.
[00:37:30] Joe: I wanna shine a light on some of the things here. OG, that Pete and Rebecca talked about 50% less chance of dying this year if you belong to an affinity group than if.You don’t, even if you’re an introvert, just belonging to your community. Such an important part of really successful retirement goes along with what West Moss’s research and his great book, what the Happiest Retirees know. The happiest retirees belong to at least three different groups, and one they of one, they officially belong to, three, they help out with, you might help out with a pancake breakfast for the Kiwanis, just, you know, volunteer to help out with that.
Help another group for their 5K. But you truly are a member of the men’s club at your local church, you know? Mm-hmm. And you’re deeply involved, but it seems like having something that’s bigger than us, big part of a successful retirement.
[00:38:22] OG: I mean, your whole life, you’ve probably been working toward some sort of achievement of some kind.Right. It’s like. Throughout your life, there’s always these things that are on the horizon. And there’s a problem with always looking at the next greatest thing that also could be bad in terms of happiness, but you’re working towards something and you know, whether it’s where we are right now, where it’s, we’re working on getting the kids through school and we’ve got one going to college, and like that’s on the, you know, we’re, we’re kind of in this achievement type of thing.
But then you think about, you know, as you get closer to retirement and it’s like, I’m working toward the gold watch, I’m working toward the pension. I’m work, you know, you’re working towards something, but along the way, you, you’re doing it as, as part of your overall, in this case, from a work standpoint, you’re looking at it from the perspective of your company, right?
It’s like, I need my division to do really well, so I get a bonus, or I need my division to do my, my company to do well. So our stock options vest and are worth a lot of money. You know, we’re always working towards something and then you get to retirement and you go, now I don’t do anything.
[00:39:24] aftershow: Yeah. [00:39:24] OG: How does that jive with everything else that’s been going on your entire life?You know, so having the next thing, whatever that is, and helping that thing work toward whatever goal that they’re working on helps. I was, um, you know, we had a lot of graduation stuff the last month or so, there was a family member of a friend of my son’s who made it to all of the games. Like he was an, they were an older couple and they never had kids.
We were talking a little bit about that and he said, you know, that’s what we decided to do. We decided that we were gonna invest all of our retirement time into our nieces and nephews and making sure that we made it to their sporting events and supported them and their school functions and helped them as we could, as the cool aunt and uncle.
That was their retirement time. It was living those teenage years again, basically, you know what I mean? Like being at the football games and the baseball games and the track meets and that sort of stuff. So they were every bit as busy as we were as parents, even though they’re of generation or half a generation ahead of us, and in the retirement time, they shouldn’t be doing all that stuff, but that’s what they filled their time with.
And we were talking about, well, now that they’re graduated, now what? Right now what now whatcha gonna do?
[00:40:33] Joe: Now go on and find some other kids, I guess, to, [00:40:35] OG: to follow. Yeah. Well they said that, what’s funny is they said, well, you know, we’re gonna miss seeing you guys, but we’ll probably be back to see William and Yeah.Caroline’s class, you know, we’ll probably stop by every so often.
[00:40:47] Joe: That’s really cool. Being a part of og just of a community, having that community feeling, thinking about the fact that we live in the same place and while these aren’t, quote my kids, they’re the community’s kids. [00:41:00] OG: Yeah. They honored a group, uh, or a husband and wife at our son’s graduation for being mentors and, and helping out at the school all the time and.They’re the people that you’d see everywhere, but you’d go, I don’t know who they are, but they seem to always be here. I don’t know who they belong to. Well, I didn’t know the story. I mean, they had had kids at the school for 25 years in one way, shape or, or form, but they were all gone and it’s been seven years since their last kid was done, but they still are there all the time.
Whoa. And so they’ve gone all the way through kindergarten, through through 12th grade, multiple times with multiple kids and doing all the kindergarten stuff and all the first grade stuff and so and so forth. And now they’re still there doing all the volunteering and they honored them with a special award at graduation for, for being mentors for all the kids, even though they don’t have kids anymore.
[00:41:48] Joe: Which is funny because it’s phenomenal and you should honor those people. But that has nothing at all to do with why they did it. [00:41:55] OG: That’s exactly what he said. He was like, you know, let’s bring Mr. And Mrs. Smith up here. And they gave him a big thing and he’s like, look, this isn’t about me. This is about the graduates today, so let’s just move on with the program.Yeah, yeah. And everybody’s like, yeah, good job. We’re all here to get through this together. Buddy. Thanks for getting off the stage. That’s fabulous. You knew it wasn’t about it. We just
[00:42:14] Joe: honored people that know a little bit of my story know that I work on this, uh, nonprofit group in Texarkana that helps build walking trails.Our city early this year recognized the founders of this group, John and Julie Ray Harrison, and when John and Julie Ray got up at the city council meeting to accept their award, all they wanted to talk about what, yeah, okay, this is nice, but we need to build more trails. Here’s what we need. These trails don’t help them.
I mean, per se, right? That there’s no profit motive. There is nothing that they stand to gain business wise. They wouldn’t even really look at the honor, oh yeah, that’s nice that you did this, but let’s use this as a platform to maybe, hopefully the newspaper’s gonna talk about this event and we can build even more trails.
Right? It was, it was really wild. But you think about this, you know, this idea of the biggest accomplishments that you remember. Not all of them, but, but many of them. I remember one time a group of us OG were going to volunteer at a homeless shelter. We were gonna serve food. And I was like, yeah, I don’t.
No hard pass, like I did not wanna do that. And for some reason I went and it was incredible. It was one of the most amazing days, and this has been several years ago now that I did that particular community focused activity. But I remember it very much and it’s always surprising to me how some of the highlights of my year, usually things that are bigger than me.
Not about
[00:43:38] OG: you. [00:43:38] Joe: Yeah. Not about me helping the community. Great stuff. And a lot of science that supports all this. Of course, we talked to Anna Corwin several years ago about why Catholic nuns live longer. They have a mission that’s bigger than them, that is beyond their lifetime. The study that we all saw of, uh, nursing homes, they had half of the, the people in the nursing home that had to take care of a plant.Don’t let this plant die. And the other half just left to their own devices. Of course, the half that had to take care of the plant live longer. Uh, great idea. And by the way, a great documentary. I know that our group in Minneapolis, our meetup group in Minneapolis, St. Paul, they’re gonna watch this documentary together.
So make sure if you’re in the Minneapolis St. Paul area that you come to that meetup. We’re gonna do a movie night in Minneapolis. Hope you can attend. I think right now they’re planning that to be the August meeting, but, uh, it’s
[00:44:30] Doug: always the best day in class when they brought in that the TV on the cart.Yeah. But the bad news is av when the AV club brings it, uh, I
[00:44:37] Joe: really like this documentary. When they brought that cart in Doug, I knew it was nap time. I was like, 45 minutes. I get to dap. Oh, so good as I skip the, skip the entire movie. All right, let’s do a headline. [00:44:51] headlines: Hello doling. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. [00:44:58] Joe: Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. And it’s written by Juliette Chung. Juliette writes, meet the stealthy wealthy who make their money. Wait for it. Everybody. The boring way. You know the stuff OG that people talk about with follow your passion and you know, passion will lead to riches.Well, these people completely did the opposite. Derek Olson grew up dreaming about the thrill of running his own business. Decades later, that dream came true and made him wealthy, just not exactly in the way he expected. Olson has made a fortune making machines that rip up flooring like carpeting in elementary schools.
Imagine, oh, what do you do for fun? I rip up flooring in elementary schools. Quote, this is how sexy it is. The average elementary school in the United States has seven miles of carpet, and children are disgusting, as said Olson, chief Executive of National Flooring Equipment, and the father of two chuckling.
So elementary schools basically need their floors redone almost every summer. It’s this niche industry that no one knows about and everybody needs. It turns out, OG, that when it comes to a lot of these people that have made tons of money doing some of these sometimes off the wall, but usually just these very boring businesses.
You know what? They’re in love with
[00:46:14] OG: money. [00:46:14] Joe: They’re in love with running the business. Yeah, money. No, they’re in love with running the business. They love the thrill of entrepreneurship. They love keeping customers happy. They love all these things which people don’t think about when they think about Follow your passion. [00:46:29] OG: It reminds me of that, uh, micro, or is it Mike Row does, does the dirty Jobs Micro, yeah, dirty jobs. Micro. If you’re world class at something or if you have something, if you have a unique skill or a unique niche, there’s plenty of money to be made. I know a guy who cleans turf, so you think about like football fields and soccer fields and you know, you go, oh, well that’s all the schools, well all the schools have it, but then all the rec areas have it.And you know, you think about like the layers and layer, you know how many football fields there are, how many soccer fields there are, you know, in your community. And they have to get washed because kids throw up on ’em and birds crap on ’em. And you know, just, who knew you had to wash turf? There’s somebody that does that.
Yeah, you gotta redo the pebbles. You know, the little rubber pellets that are in there, they get kind of moved around, you know, and so they gotta even ’em out again to make it last longer.
[00:47:21] Joe: A couple weeks ago on Memorial Day, and a lot of people every year miss the Memorial Day episode. Obviously you’re with friends and family.On that holiday, but we feature Bonnie Hammer, who was the vice chairperson of NB Cuni Universal. And Bonnie was talking about the lies we get told at work. And og one of her biggest lies, one of the first ones she talked about on the show, if you go back and listen to it, is follow your passion. And she said it needs to be follow the opportunity because I’m sure that that guy that cleans turf didn’t, you know, in sixth grade go, oh my God, I’d love to, you know, you know what I love?
I love clean turf. I want to pick barf pieces out of plastic grass. Right? I am all about that. But somewhere along the way, he got an opportunity to do a thing. Yeah. Where there was a spot for him and he turned that into an entire industry and career for himself.
[00:48:15] OG: I think it’s also interesting to juxtapose this against like the, uh, formulaic after you get done with school, you have to go to college thing.There were some kids in my son’s class that were not going to college. They were going to HVAC school or going to be firefighters or whatever. And he didn’t say, he’s not the type of kid to be like, look down on that. But I could tell there was a little bit of like, uh, you know, well, Jack’s not going to college.
You know, that kind of said little, just, just a little bit of, just a little, uh, something. I said, well, what are they? Well, he’s gonna go, you know, work, he’s gonna go be a welder or something. I go, Jack’s gonna make more money than probably 85% of your class. Yeah. And he’s gonna start making it tomorrow
[00:48:54] Doug: right away. [00:48:55] OG: Yeah. Like he’s making 30 bucks an hour training. You’re spending $600 a credit hour at, you know, at a, whatever it is, you know, at school. So it’s like, this dude’s getting paid day one and by the time he’s 25, he is gonna have a thousand hours or 2000 hours of experience doing this and be making a million dollars a year.So I think there’s, some of it is not necessarily follow your passion. ’cause the things that I’m passionate about, I, I don’t happen to be. Uniquely able to do, you know, I love playing golf. I’m just not particularly strong at it. So, you know, if I were to say I wanna follow my passion of golfing and be a pro golfer, I, I would be penniless.
But I think there is some truth to find the thing that you’re good at and do repeatedly. ’cause that will lead to, to your point, I think Joe opportunities. But you also have to be open to open to the things that show up in your lap. Yeah. Was this the article that the guy who did the um, the floor mats, the weather tech guy, everybody knows Weather Tech now, but I think he was in this article too.
It
[00:49:54] Joe: is, yeah. [00:49:55] OG: Further down. Yeah. His story is pretty interesting. You just notice he was renting a car in Europe and he goes, well this is way better. These are just rubber floor mats and everything just stays clean. Like this is a way better deal than those crappy ones you get when you buy a brand new car and they get dirty with all the whatever.And so he just said, the heck with it, I’m gonna buy the patent and move the production to America and. Market the crap out of it. Off he went.
[00:50:19] Joe: The piece goes on behind a paycheck. The largest source of income for the 1% highest earners in the US isn’t being a partner at an investment bank. Something we always hear about, right?Or launching a one in a million tech startup. We hear about that all the time too. It’s owning a medium sized regional business. Many of them are distinctly boring and extremely lucrative, like auto dealerships, beverage distributors, grocery stores, dental practices, and law firms according to Ziar and wic, to the people they talked about before.
Their analysis of tax data from 2000 to 2022 suggest the importance of such business ownership to the US economy has grown. The share income that ownership generates has increased to 34.9% in 2022 from 30.3% in 2014 for the top 1%. So more and more, but people OG that are in the top 1% or even the top. 0.1% of earners are there because they own businesses.
That’s a, that’s a big number. In fact, for people watching the video this, they’ll see the graph. I’m gonna explain to everybody else what we got here. For people that are in the top, 90 to 95% wages are how most of those people made money. You get to top 95 to 99% wages come down and here comes business.
It’s when you get to the top 1%, they begin to come close closer. 50% of the people report that wages got them there, 35% report businesses got them there, and then the 0.01 business ownership is the way to go. So there’s owning these small businesses, OG can be a real boon.
[00:51:55] OG: Yeah. Owning medium. Size regional businesses.Yeah.
[00:51:59] Doug: Yeah. Wouldn’t we all love to do that? I mean, we’re obviously very pro entrepreneurship and, and pro small business on the Stacking Benjamin Show. We have been since nearly day one, but I think it’s a huge disservice to tell kids this is a great time of year to talk about this because there’s so many young people who are transitioning from one stage of their life to the next.It’s a huge disservice to use that old trope about, you know, find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. Because honestly, what most of us love to do is not something that is incredibly valuable to other people. And or if it is, there’s such a small number of people who can be fabulously wealthy based on that, whether it’s writing or it’s singing or it’s, you know, making movies or playing sports.
You know, when I was that age, I thought I was gonna be a writer, that I have a degree in technical writing, but I really thought I was gonna be a creative writer at the time, and it was something I loved doing and the path to being incredibly successful in that I. Arena is so narrow and so twisty and almost impossible to get really good at.
And had I tried to do that, I would’ve missed out on the greatest joys of my life with my family. Not that what I ended up doing was something that I despised. I enjoyed doing it, but I, what I enjoyed about it was the people that I worked with as much or more than the tasks that I was doing. And you can find that joy in just about anything.
And then finding something that is at least lucrative enough to allow you to spend time with people you love. That’s plenty. I mean, that’s, that’s more than most people can dream of right there. Find something that allows you all of those other luxuries in life and you have won.
[00:53:44] Joe: That’s why I love, uh, great points, Doug.That’s why I love this piece. And I absolutely loved Bonnie’s advice of follow the opportunity. I mean, I loved her story. You know, as I mentioned, people should go back and listen to it, but I. You know, she thought she was gonna be a photographer and then she figured out that that was not only, oh God, incredibly boring.
[00:54:03] Doug: When’s the last time you paid for a photo [00:54:05] Joe: commercial photography where she’s setting up these shots that are just all very generic and doing the same crap over and over. She didn’t like it at all and it wasn’t what she thought. She ended up in television instead. So she used the best of photography to really set up shots to make, you know, shows that we watch.So she was still using her talent. But looking outside, to your point, looking outside that thing, there’s still been things in your life that were creative where you got to use writing and it really worked. Yeah. You didn’t have to be a quote writer to write a ton. Right. And use that skill forever. I also wanna do this ’cause you also began with, you know, we’re entrepreneurial on this chart from this Wall Street Journal piece.
It’s also important to see that people that are in the top 99%. People, wages will still get you there. We’re not saying you have to be an entrepreneur, right? You don’t have to be. But certainly if you wanna be that top oh one being, being an entrepreneur’s the way to go, wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal a link to it in our show notes at stacky Benjamins dot com.
And of course, we will reference great pieces like this that we find out on the internet. We always try to curate the best stuff, the best of the best that we find. Kevin Bailey is uh, just amazing at parsing out all the goodness. Before he worked with us at Stacking Benjamins, he was at Vanguard and at TIA to incredibly fine institutions.
And now, man, he is always out there digging and the stuff that he finds in our 2 0 1 newsletter every week. To advance these conversations further, which is why we call it the two oh one, you can get in your email for free. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. We got one segment left and we call this the back porch.
And, and I just want to say a big thanks to people around the country that we’ve met. You know, this episode was so much about community and whenever we go and we meet our community, truly you don’t create a podcast for reasons other than than community. And that said, it can be a little, a little weird when it’s just guys, the three of us sitting here on the mic, just chatting with each other, and then you go to places.
I was just in Boston and that was fantastic. I was in Seattle. When I’ve gone to Cleveland, when, when we’ve, we’ve gone around the country and talked to Stackers. It’s always the community. I think that really makes this a great time. Yeah, I don’t think that’s why Meghan Markle did it though. Created a podcast, not for the community.
I
[00:56:33] Doug: didn’t even know Meghan Markle had a podcast. Yeah. Except she got a giant freaking fat check because to start a podcast, she didn’t care about a community like us. Well then maybe it should, but maybe I should have said us. That’s, that’s why people do podcast. No, Joe, some of them get approached. You think they might be in it for a little bit of, [00:56:55] Joe: a little bit of cash [00:56:56] Doug: possible.I want to go sleep with a royal just so I can,
[00:57:01] Joe: but community is definitely important to us and having these great friendships and meeting all these different people. I gotta say I love, love, love the discussions we can have on Spotify when people talk to us there. And I also get a little frustrated on, on Apple because we can’t.The great thing about this community is we can decide what to do with our money whenever we want to. We talk about that all the time. We can live our lives the way we want to, right? We don’t have to chase our quote passion. We can go after the boring job if we want. This is all about choices and about really being different people.
And little frustrating to me is a couple of the reviews that we’ve had recently that aren’t even about the podcast. It’s really just judging somebody’s choices about how they decided to spend their money. And uh, for people that don’t know Paula Pants, cat has cancer. And Paula decided she, Paula doesn’t have kids.
Paula’s financially independent. She decided to do something I wouldn’t do in a million years. I would never, ever, ever put my cat on treatments to extend my cat’s life. And that’s my decision. Paula’s not me. Paula’s not you. So I, I don’t know. I’m always up for a good review. I’m always up for a bad review.
Reviews about somebody’s life choices, and then talking about our show because somebody expressed the fact that they did something with their money that’s different than you. Man. I love you guys. I love our community and I come here and I think we all come here to just have a good time. And so I’m really sad at Apple that we can’t just answer that directly.
I didn’t wanna even really talk about that on the show, but I do think it needs to be addressed, that need to be said. People felt strong enough to write a review of our show. I just wanna respond. All right. Big thanks to people who’ve hung out with us. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today.
Thank you again to our whole community. By the way, if you are in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul, our meetup group is going to be living the show all over again, looking at this great work that Pete and Rebecca created. So go dive in. If you’re not there, grab a bunch of friends and dive in. In fact, we’re talking about guys bringing Pete, Rebecca to Texarkana.
’cause friends of mine that are in Rotary and Kiwanis are like, I think we need to just bring
[00:59:25] Doug: this to our community. I just think it’s amazing how Pete Davidson has turned his life around. I mean, he, he really, he went from being this guy that was just off the rails, totally covered in tattoos, finally got the tattoos removed.He’s getting some great, uh, promotional deals with Taco Bell, and now he’s making movies on, on personal finance. You’re talking about Pete Davidson. That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time. Right? I love how Doug shows up the last, wait a minute. What? Who were those people that came down? I thought maybe he got rid of that, that accent that he had.
Also, maybe just to make himself a little bit more approachable to Midwesterners. But I just, I mean, I’m just really impressed.
[01:00:02] Joe: I love to thing Pete Davidson said recently goes, remember when I was blonde for like 15 minutes? Yeah, that was pretty funny. That was pretty good. Ability to laugh at himself.Pretty damn good. Yeah. All right, Doug, get us outta here, ma’am. What should we have learned on today’s show?
[01:00:15] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from Pete and Rebecca Davis. Uh, Davidson apparently wanna live a long, happy life. Take on some things that are bigger than you and join. You’ll find yourself living longer and happier, and it only costs marginally more than living alone.Second, follow your passion. Turns out you can be wealthy and happy without following any of that advice. Let the big lesson. These neighborhood kids are so civically minded. It’s just, it’s so inspiring. Listen to this. Besides the wonderful toilet paper and the tree celebration, they plan to ring older people’s doorbells and then dash off and hide a apparently so that these older people get reminded of the joy of just going outside, you know, just to enjoy the fresh air.
Just no reason at all. Just be outside God. They’re always thinking about the, the whole community and the elder people. These kids are just so great nowadays. Thanks to Pete and Rebecca Davis for joining us today. You’ll find their film Join or Die on Netflix. Netflix, grab a group of friends and watch it together.
We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Netflix. This show is the Property of SP podcasts, LLC, copyright 2025. It is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.
Come say hello. Oh yeah, and before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. 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.
[01:03:04] aftershow: We were talking about [01:03:06] Joe: the, um, prank phone calls. The best way. Somebody, somebody’s, I heard a comedian maybe say this, Doug, you might know it’s really not [01:03:14] OG: a thing anymore. You know that, right? I know, [01:03:16] Joe: but, but it’s a lost heart. Well, you can actually still do this, but the, the stakes are much higher ’cause people are gonna know it was you.There’s no way for them to not know it’s you. But they said, let’s say you’re out late, you’re in Vegas. You have no idea what time it is. It’s just the middle of the night and your watch stops working. You know what you do? Just call up a random person. And the first thing that Doug’s gonna say when he answers the phone is, my God, it’s three 30 in the morning.
You just go, thank
[01:03:46] Doug: you. Like back in the day when we, we, there was a number we could call to get the time. You could, you needed to set your clocks and you, there was a number you could call. Do you think that number still exists? No way. Like, but the Google [01:03:59] Joe: ranking has gone way down. Like, they’re like, they’re like, bill, maybe we need to play a different chime and people will come back. [01:04:06] OG: You mentioned earlier, you know, it’s the time of the year where people are, there’s some change, right? You got college graduates and high school graduates and things like that. I, I saw this the other day that I thought would be, was pretty apropos for the time of the year. [01:04:19] bit: They’ll see you in September.Have a great summer. What’s that? You going somewhere? No, it’s June 30th. It’s time for summer vacation. Oh. Before I forget, will you send my daytimer? Yeah. We don’t, we don’t have summer vacations here. This is your job, what? You work through summer, but what am I supposed to look forward to?
[01:04:41] aftershow: Retirement death.Oh. You know, I had to replace my furnace and I got a little bit of a rebate on it, so that was nice. Yeah.
[01:04:50] bit: All right. Well see you Monday. See you Monday. Every Monday. [01:04:55] OG: What is that from? It’s just a video that’s like, yeah. It’s just a, it’s just a young worker that’s like, well, it’s have a nice summer, everybody.Wait, what? Like, wait, what? Whatcha talking about? Hold
[01:05:05] Doug: on. Stay Gold Pony boy. [01:05:08] OG: What’s that mean? [01:05:10] Doug: I [01:05:10] OG: don’t [01:05:10] Doug: know either. [01:05:12] OG: What the hell does that mean? Stay Gold Pony Boy. It’s from The Outsiders. I don’t even know what that is. He, Hinton never heard of her. [01:05:21] Doug: Like when you’d sign people’s yearbooks and you’d say like, stay cool over the summer, that’s something you would say in, in somebody’s yearbook. [01:05:30] OG: Huh? [01:05:31] Joe: We were at Fenway Park, all the stands start singing this song and, and Cheryl turns to me and she’s like, what is this song she’d never heard? Chappelle, Rowan and uh, pink Pony Club. And the whole place is singing Pink Pony Club. Like the entire stadium is singing it. And Cheryl’s like, I have never heard the song.And now Cheryl walks around the house singing Pink Pony Club like all the time ever since we got back. Who sings that? Joe Chappelle. Rowan. Why
[01:06:02] Doug: Chappelle? Dave Chappelle, Rowan. [01:06:06] Joe: Why? What? What’s her name? Chapel. Chapel wrote, [01:06:09] Doug: I think it’s Chapel. [01:06:10] Joe: Ah, it’s somebody. It’s somebody. I dunno anything.
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