transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere?

Speaker 2:
[00:04] Anywhere.

Speaker 1:
[00:05] What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris?

Speaker 3:
[00:08] Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 1:
[00:10] Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad and Tulum?

Speaker 4:
[00:13] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 1:
[00:15] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all 9,000 properties?

Speaker 5:
[00:22] When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now.

Speaker 1:
[00:30] You should look into the bond market. That's where the money is.

Speaker 6:
[00:33] Ben's in junk bonds. Jules, it's high-yield bonds.

Speaker 1:
[00:38] Do I tell people you're in junk waitressing?

Speaker 6:
[00:46] Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's The Stacking Benjamins Show. I'm Joe Spombs' neighbor, Doug, and in the spotlight today, crypto. Have you avoided cryptocurrencies until now, but could really use a 101 discussion? We've got your back with all the coins, exchanges, wallets and more. Its definitions galore with crypto and stock trading author, Joe Duarte. In our headline segment, more ugly news about long-term care from AARP. We'll share the details and how that might change your plan. Plus, I'll come sailing in with maybe the world's best trivia question ever. Yeah, I said it. Well, at least one as good as Monday's, which was pretty darn good. And now, two guys who told me that while they were amazing Monday today, they are ready for even better stuff. It's Joe and O-J-J-J-J-G.

Speaker 7:
[01:58] That's right, Doug, continuous improvement plan here in Mom's Basement, hopefully better every episode. So today, buckle up, Buttercup, because we are bringing it, and the guy who I'm gonna rely on to make sure he brings it, because I'm not sure how much I have in me today, is Mr. OG.

Speaker 4:
[02:19] Sorry, I wasn't paying attention.

Speaker 7:
[02:20] Perfect.

Speaker 4:
[02:21] Am I supposed to do something? Is that what you just said?

Speaker 7:
[02:23] We are already so much better than on Monday. OG, today, we are getting into an area that neither you nor I really participated much. Crypto. I've owned some crypto. Have you ever bought any crypto?

Speaker 4:
[02:36] I buy $100 of Bitcoin every Sunday, like clockwork.

Speaker 7:
[02:40] Just dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin.

Speaker 4:
[02:43] Yeah, it is super volatile. I don't expect to ever have this money available to me ever. I don't expect it to be worth anything. In the off chance that it's worth a bajillion dollars, then yay. But I also think it's important to know a little bit about a bunch of different areas. So I do the thing that other people experiment with. I also experiment with it.

Speaker 7:
[03:07] That's why I bought $2,000 of it just to see and to feel the emotions and to understand what was going on. I've since sold it. I got my fill. However, I think it is important to your point to be able to know what's what. You and I have been told through this great coaching organization that we both participated in called Strategic Coach, Ask Who, Not How. For me, there's so many bad actors in the crypto space OG that-

Speaker 4:
[03:34] The Hawke Tua girl?

Speaker 7:
[03:37] Yeah. I don't believe any of them. I don't believe it. Look at how she got taken.

Speaker 4:
[03:43] She claims to be a victim.

Speaker 7:
[03:45] Maybe she got taken, maybe she didn't, but certainly not the who you want to learn from. Joe Duarte is a guy whose work I've been reading for a long time. Joe is a retired anesthesiologist. He's a guy who likes diving into how individual stocks work and how to understand the stock market. He understands stock buy and hold. He understands stock investing. When I heard that Joe Duarte was getting into crypto and could explain on a 101 basis what all these terms are, what you got to know, he was the guy who was, I think, OG, a great who for us. So he's not somebody who is going to tell you it's fantastic. I would bet he's upstairs talking to mom now, so we'll see. But I think Joe Duarte is going to say exactly what you just said, OG, that there's a little bit of buyer beware here. However, a lot of people participate. A lot of people have made great money at it. My brother-in-law, one of them, he's done phenomenally well at it and is also a believer in the future of cryptocurrency and what it's going to do. So Joe Duarte is going to join us today. I'm really excited about that. Before we get to him though, Stacking Benjamins has a couple sponsors that help us keep on keeping on. We play just a couple of these sponsor spots at the beginning, and then we only have a couple more during Doug's trivia, and that's it for the entire episode. We have one sponsor that is very near and dear to us, and that is The Vault. That's because we partner with the teams at Array and Budget Simple. Budget Simple is working very hard right now because in the very, very near future, we're going to be able to help you with The Vault, track your net worth, and get your budget in order at the same place we're already helping you with privacy, your identity, your subscriptions. It is the Swiss Army Knife. Why have seven different places to do all these things when you could have just one? That's stackingbenjamins.com/vault. So big, big exciting news from The Vault. Of course, a couple more sponsors, we're going to hear from them. And then Joe Duarte joins us to share with us cryptocurrency 101. You may not know that when we started Stacking Benjamins, it was a blog and even then just the startup cost. I remember thinking, is this the right thing? And what if I write things and nobody comes, right? Well, luckily that didn't end up happening. But starting something new isn't just hard. It's terrifying. There's so much work. You're not sure whether it's going to work out. You're not sure if anybody's going to read it. And then when we change it to a podcast, is anybody actually going to listen, right? What if nobody wants all the stuff that we have? Well, had I used Shopify, it would have been even easier because with their expertise, their helpful tools and their easy to use platform, that's something that would have made Stacking Benjamins more effective much, much more quickly. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US. Names you've heard of like Hines and Mattel, Shopify, Gymshark, Aviator Nation, Allbirds, also all Shopify. Get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. Did I mention that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses around the world? It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less cards going abandoned and more sales for you. So you're stacking Benjamins much more quickly. Time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/sb. Go to shopify.com/sb. That's shopify.com/sb. Spring cleanings made its way to my closet. This time of year always makes me rethink exactly what's in my closet. Really want to keep fewer things, but I also want to keep better ones. I want to feel confident and to feel confident looking the parts, a big piece of that. So I want pieces that are well made and that are easy to wear all the time. And that's why I keep coming back to Quint. The fabrics feel elevated. The fits are thoughtful. Pricing actually makes sense. As I'm swapping out and I'm cutting, the few additions I'm making all come from Quint. Quint makes high-quality, everyday essentials using premium materials like 100% European linen. They're insanely soft, flow-knit, activewear fabric. Their men's linen pants and shirts are lightweight. They're breathable. They're comfortable. Basically the perfect layer for spring. The pants strike the right balance between laid back and refined. If you saw the video of me on stage at Retire Meet, those pants are from Quint. It was really cool. I came off stage and Christine Benz from Morningstar getting ready to go on behind me and said, love your pants. Not generally. I absolutely love them. I think they make me look put together without trying too hard. They're Flona active wear, moisture wicking, anti-odor, soft enough that you'll actually want to wear all day. The best part is their prices. This is important, stackers. They are 50 to 60 percent less than similar brands. How? Quints works directly with ethical factories, cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Everything is designed to last and make getting dressed easy, which is another thing I think we all want. I love those pants that I wore on stage. It's the cashmere sweater that every time I wear it, Cheryl goes, that is my favorite sweater on you. It looks great, feels great, and I don't have to have 50 things in my closet. So, like I am, refresh your wardrobe with quints. Go to quints.com/sb for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to quince.com/sb for free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com/sb. And I'm super happy this gentleman's making his way down to Mom's Basement. Joe Duarte's here. How are you?

Speaker 2:
[10:22] I'm doing great. It's 80 degrees outside. It's super windy and cloudy, and we're gonna have a storm, and I'm not in any of that, so things are looking up.

Speaker 7:
[10:32] I know it's always better, Joe, to be in Mom's Basement during that time. One of the few times people say it's better to be in Mom's Basement. But here's the reason why I wanted to talk to you, because I've been following your work for a while, Joe. I know you as an options guy. I know you as a basics of investing guy. You've taught people in their 20s and 30s how to invest. So when I see that Joe Duarte is involved in writing a book about cryptocurrency, I was like, wait, what? How did you first get introduced to cryptocurrency? What's your background been?

Speaker 2:
[11:07] It's like everything else for me. I just think that things happened for a reason. And a lot of the things in my life that have happened are just chance meetings and things that develop from there. As you say, I've been trading options and stocks for, you know, since 1987, 1990, depending on whatever timeline you want to use. I'm an anesthesiologist retired now and I trade for a living. But I found out early that the same skills that make you a good anesthesiologist, the ability to observe and to react rapidly and to be correct when the situation calls for it, are the same things that make you a successful trader or investor.

Speaker 7:
[11:50] That's interesting, Joe, because being an anesthesiologist, because I have a couple of friends who are anesthesiologists, most of the time doing nothing is the right move, right?

Speaker 2:
[11:59] Yeah. My old department chairman always said anesthesia was like 99% boredom and 1% sheer panic. And that pretty much describes investing. How I got started in crypto is kind of through the back door. I was like many people, a skeptic. I mean, what is this thing? I don't understand it. What is all this volatility in the prices? What can you do with it? You know, those are the things that used to occasionally come in my mind. And then I'd go back to trading stocks. But one thing led to another and the thing just didn't go away. Cryptocurrencies, I think, are here to stay, like them or not. So I said, you know what? It's probably a good time for an old guy like me that trades stocks and options to kind of see if this thing is worthwhile. You know, I'm big on price charts, as you well know. And when I see something that moves like crypto does, it gets my attention because you can make money on the upside and you can make money on the downside. And so as a skeptic, I missed that. But as I became more interested, I became more aware of it. And so to me, crypto is an asset class that can be invested in and it can be traded. And when it goes up, you can trade it going up. When it goes down, you can trade it going down. If you're inclined that way. If you don't want to trade it on the way down, then you can wait for it to bottom out and go back up again. If you want to buy some crypto and hold it till the end of time, then you're welcome to do that too. So the bottom line is, I went from a non-believer to a pragmatist. I'm not one of those people that has put all my money in crypto, and I don't really think I want to. But if that's what you'd like to do, then you better read up because it's complex and complicated at the same time. So I think that's kind of a good starting point for where I am. And just to clear up, the reason I wrote this book is because, number one, someone asked me to. But number two, it was a challenge. I said, okay, if I write this thing, then I'm really going to have to buck up. I'm really going to have to dive in. I'm really going to have to learn the ins and outs of this stuff. And it has really worked out for me because now my trading is so much more informed than it was before I wrote this book.

Speaker 7:
[14:32] I want to give everyone the question. I think at the end of the interview, I'm going to save it, but I'm going to want to ask you what surprised you as you were to use your turn bucking up on it. That'll be, I think, interesting. But I think we got to start at the beginning because I might be Joe, where you were when you began your journey, because I got to be honest, every time somebody says the word blockchain, I nod like I understand, right? And then immediately, I hope nobody asks a follow-up question because if they do, they're going to see, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. So let's start there because you're going to be our translator for the rest of us fakers. What the hell is blockchain?

Speaker 2:
[15:12] So blockchain is nothing more than an online ledger system. That's really all it is. It's where all the crypto transactions are logged and stored. Okay. And you can make it as complicated as you want. But that's basically what it is. It's a record-keeping system. And there's plenty of nuance to it. And there's plenty of complicated stuff that goes along with it. And if you want to dive in, you can just spend days just learning about blockchain. The cryptographic stuff, you know, to say Joe Blow bought this from Mr. Smith, you know, it's like 100 letters. But at the end of the day, it's just a record of a transaction.

Speaker 7:
[15:56] Was there a problem this was trying to solve in the first place initially?

Speaker 2:
[16:01] The reason crypto was created was, you know, there's plenty of people that did bits and pieces before Mr. Nakamoto, you know, the guy that invented Bitcoin and all that. The bottom line was people wanted to conduct transactions with anonymity and lower fees and without having to wait for a third party such as Chase Bank or the Federal Reserve or the US Treasury to say, it's okay for this to happen. And that's where the term decentralized finance comes from. That famous buzzword. And crypto is like all buzzwords, you know?

Speaker 6:
[16:43] Right, right.

Speaker 2:
[16:45] The DeFi decentralized is all about taking out the middle man. And of course, later on, we can come back to it and talk about how the middle man is trying to horn in. But that's a totally separate top.

Speaker 7:
[16:58] As I'm listening to you today and as I was reading, I kind of felt like it is both revolutionary, but also like the next version of Excel, but easier to move from point to point with like a better PR team. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2:
[17:12] Well, the thing about crypto is that whenever something happens, it's always followed by a hundred million other things that are related to it. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of the definition of complexity, which is lots of moving parts bumping against one another till it gets to a certain place and then something happens, that's crypto. It's always moving, it's always evolving, and just when you think you understand what's going on, it changes. That's why there's so many different coins out there. There's four, five hundred, six hundred coins, and it's nutty.

Speaker 7:
[17:51] I'm glad you brought that up because understanding blockchain for me was step number one. Like, what is this?

Speaker 2:
[17:58] You got it now?

Speaker 7:
[17:59] I do. I do. I got the record keeping. Like, the basic is this is record keeping. But if blockchain is the engine, then, Joe, let's look at what are the actual cars people are driving. You've got these things, Bitcoin that you mentioned earlier, Ethereum and all the others. Like, what's the difference in plain English? Are these competing or are they doing different jobs?

Speaker 2:
[18:18] The answer is yes and no. OK, I think for a beginner, you want to get familiar with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the central cog in the entire Bitcoin operation. Once you understand Bitcoin, then you can add extra pieces and bits of knowledge to it. So you got to get your arms around Bitcoin first. Bitcoin is essentially for payments and for investing and trading. Those are really all of its major functions. Ethereum, on the other hand, evolved after wait for it, wait for it. There was a hack and the system decided, you know what, this doesn't work. So we're going to move on and form a new Ethereum blockchain. And what we want to do is we want to be the centerpiece for commercial activity, investing and everything on the Web 3 or Web number 3. So where you can invest and trade in Bitcoin, Ethereum, you know, you can actually make a whole lot more transactions. It works faster than Bitcoin in many cases. And it's really just a question of what you're looking for. But if you understand those two, then you can understand the rest of them, because they're all variations on that theme.

Speaker 7:
[19:44] But to some degree, then what you're saying is it truly is a little bit Coke versus Pepsi versus trucks or motorcycles, which do, you know, I guess trucks and motorcycles have different functions, but they both are vehicles. This smells to me based on your explanation, like this is more of a Coke versus Pepsi.

Speaker 2:
[20:05] In a sense, it is. And a lot of it depends on how far you want to dive into this thing. I just want to trade. But if you're a true believer and you really don't want to deal with dollars and pounds and euros, and you'd rather deal in Ethereum, then there's a huge ecosystem. You can pay for travel costs with Ethereum. You can pay your bills in some cases with Ethereum. You can even buy groceries in some stores. And there's always some finagling with some app or something or other, you know. But what do you want to do with it? Get to know the things first and then figure out what you want to do.

Speaker 7:
[20:44] Let's do a quick lightning round because there's a bunch of words people pretend to understand at parties and they don't. Much again, I do the head nod. But can you give us a very quick, what is stablecoin? I hear people talk about stablecoin. What is that?

Speaker 2:
[21:00] A stablecoin is nothing more than a cryptocurrency that is pegged to an asset, and it's supposed to stay stable in price.

Speaker 7:
[21:10] Is this almost like a different economy will peg their dollar to the US dollar, that type of thing?

Speaker 2:
[21:17] Same sort of dynamic in principle.

Speaker 7:
[21:19] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[21:20] A stablecoin is basically, again, a perfect example of how the crypto dynamic evolves. What is things volatile? We want to still do crypto, but can we make it stable? So how are we going to do that? And then the stablecoin concept developed. So now you have stablecoins that basically fluctuate a few pennies above or a few pennies below the US dollar if they're pegged to the dollar.

Speaker 7:
[21:45] I would guess then, Joe, the selling point here is for people that really want to use it as currency, not as trading, because I would guess stable is a big selling point. In a world, crypto has become synonymous with chaos to some degree.

Speaker 2:
[22:00] I agree. It is chaotic at times because pure crypto trading, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest of them, it's volatile. A stable coin is something that you can use for commerce. This is crude and the true believers might not agree, but you can think of stable coins as a money market fund type vehicle for crypto. I mean that in the sense of you can, what they call, stake your stable coins, meaning you can loan them and collect interest on them. That gives it that money market fund feel. Or you can just leave it there. And if you have 10,000 stable coins, it's going to be 10,000 whenever you need it, to buy your next trade of Bitcoin or to pay for your groceries, whatever it is, depending on the situation.

Speaker 7:
[22:52] Joe, it's interesting. We spoke with an economics professor and a research fellow from Cornell a number of years ago. And I remember him talking about crypto in the early days. We had him on, and he was talking about you're going to see central banks get involved. And he was the person that introduced to me this idea of central bank digital currency. It appears that has become the case around the world. We have lots of central bank digital currency. But do you mind giving us the quick Cliffs notes to what central bank digital currency even is?

Speaker 2:
[23:26] Again, simple concept, the most accessible central bank digital currency is the digital yuan in China. It's basically a digital version of the yuan. You can pay for bus rides or whatever it is you're going to pay with your digital wallet. And it's the same as if you had a yuan bill, and you put it in the box. That's not the same thing as a cryptocurrency. Central banks don't have control over cryptocurrencies. In fact, in the United States, there was a law that was passed in 2025, along with the so-called Genius Act, which regulates stable coins. And it says that the Federal Reserve cannot have a central bank digital currency because if they do, then they can snoop into everyone's financial transactions all the time without having to go through any court or anything like that.

Speaker 7:
[24:26] That comes with the territory in China, then, with the digital one. Like the government is watching you pay for your bus ride.

Speaker 2:
[24:33] Right. Right. And then that's the thing about central bank digital currencies. If you have one, then the government knows what you're doing. And that goes against the original tenets of crypto, which was anonymity and ease of transaction.

Speaker 7:
[24:48] Well, then what is an electronic US dollar? Because you also write about this in Cryptocurrency 101.

Speaker 2:
[24:53] Well, an electronic US dollar is another offshoot of the stable coins. And it's not one I'm very familiar with. I think the best thing to do is to stick with the big ones. Tether and USDC. Those are the big ones. That's where you start. When you're talking about stable coins, you want to stick with the big ones. And a lot of it has to do not just with being hip, because you're trading the big ones or you're dealing with the big ones. It has to do with liquidity. It has to do with privacy. And it has to do with the fact that if you trade with a discount broker, that's not very reputable and you compare it to something like Fidelity, that's the same kind of vibe. At least when you first get started, you want to stay with the big guys.

Speaker 7:
[25:39] Yeah, this truly still is in a lot of these smaller coins. My understanding from you and from others, Joe, is that this truly is the Wild West. If you stick with the big guys, there's more safety in numbers.

Speaker 2:
[25:50] The problem with crypto is that there's still huge potential for the big two nasties, I call them, hacks and scams. Just the other day, and it escapes me right now, who got hacked because it happens so often. But again, a fairly big operator with an app of some sort that I don't use, and I'm never going to use, got hacked. And I'm thinking, guys, we've been at this for a good 15, 20 years now, one way or another, you'd think the security would be a little bit better in some of these things. So that's why I'm always saying, at least in the beginning, before you learn a lot of detail and gain some experience, you want to stay with the big ones. If you're going to go with the regular crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum, if you're going to go with stable coins, USDT, which is Tether and USDC.

Speaker 7:
[26:43] I feel like this is going into your more natural world, Joe, the world of options. What you're telling us is, right if you covered calls, we're using a big broker. Use this in a very conservative way so that you don't get killed. Speaking of using this stuff, by the way, let's say I'm convinced or I'm at least crypto curious, I need to now use it myself. You mentioned some of these places that might get hacked in exchange. Is that like a swab or a fidelity but for crypto?

Speaker 2:
[27:14] Yes. The short answer is yes. There's three of them that are really the gold standards, not without risk and not without nuance, but Coinbase is based in the United States. It's highly rated and highly reliable and efficient. It's actually considered the best place for many beginners to start. The other one is Binance. They were originally based in China. They're huge. They've had their problems. They got busted for money laundering and they had to pay the US government billions, and their CEO got fired. Then he got pardoned by Trump, if I'm not mistaken. Again, even the big guys, you have to be very cautious about what you do and how you do it. Then there's a lesser known one known as Kraken. Kraken was actually the first real exchange. That one is sort of an in-between. It's like okay for beginners, but also has a lot of big time pro-grade stuff, technical analysis, you can trade options, you can trade futures, you can do all kinds of very aggressive things on Kraken. You can as well on Coinbase and Binance. That's what Kraken is basically known for.

Speaker 7:
[28:31] Much like I store my dollars in a wallet, you have wallets for your crypto, and you've got these three different types of wallets, a hot wallet, a cold wallet, and a mobile wallet. Like why does this all sound like I need a survival kit, Joe?

Speaker 2:
[28:47] Well, so again, simple. A hot wallet is always connected to the internet. And so that's the wallet basically that you set up when you open your account at Binance. And not to be confused with Binance wallet, which is a separate entity that's affiliated with it. Let's keep it simple. So hot wallet, always connected to the internet. Cold wallet is one where you actually have like a gadget that you store all your keys and your information in. And that only gets connected to the internet when you plug it in to your computer or through whatever wifi or other method of connection you decide to use. A mobile wallet is sort of like a hot wallet that's not always connected. Again, it's kind of a hybrid thing. But more than anything else, it works on your cell phone, you know, and then of course there's apps and more apps, the more goofy things get. So you just got to be careful. You want to keep it simple. If I was going to do something like that, I would probably use either a hot wallet through the exchange, the big exchange, or use a reputable cold wallet.

Speaker 7:
[30:04] It's interesting, because this idea of a mobile wallet sounds to me almost like the credit freezing used to be really hard. Now you can credit freeze just by doing a slider. It sounds like that's what they're kind of solving for. It's the same thing. I could just slide it on my phone to make it hot or cold depending on.

Speaker 2:
[30:20] You know, again, it involves apps. In my opinion, when you throw an app into crypto, you're adding a different level of complexity. And so that's not what I would do to get started. I would keep it as simple as possible.

Speaker 7:
[30:35] You mentioned a word earlier called staking. You just mentioned it in passing. That sounds like grilling. Making a stake, not investing. What is staking?

Speaker 2:
[30:45] It's basically you're loaning your crypto to someone for a payoff. Oh, yeah. There's multiple, multiple ways of doing it, you know, directly, indirectly, what they call peer to peer and so on and so forth. Again, that wouldn't be my first step in crypto. I would look at it and research it carefully and make sure that I was going to give my money back within a certain amount of time. It gets to the point where if the network is busy, your payments might get delayed on staking. Like I said earlier, crypto is like you hit one button and then 150,000 other buttons go off at the same time simultaneously that make everything complicated.

Speaker 7:
[31:30] And the last term that I wanted to bring up today for our 101 is this idea of mining. So do I need a warehouse and a power plant or can I do this next to my Peloton where I'm mining? What's mining all about?

Speaker 2:
[31:45] Mining is where you set up a computer rig and then you plug it to a platform and then you compete for creating Bitcoin or validating transactions. And if your computer wins, then you get paid. The problem with it is that large corporations have warehouses full of servers that are competing with you, which means that once in a while you might get lucky and crack the code before someone else does. But most of the time, direct crypto mining is prohibitively expensive for most people. And it's got all kinds of other problems, like it'll make your house so hot, it could even catch on fire. So you have to invest in cooling systems and all kinds of things.

Speaker 7:
[32:29] Let's talk about where people get burned. You mentioned you like it to invest in it. Should this be an investment for most people when they're starting out? Or is that the wrong way to think about it? And then what's the biggest investing mistake? Assuming that the answer is yes to that, that yeah, investing in it is good. What's the biggest mistake beginners make?

Speaker 2:
[32:57] Rushing in, that's the biggest mistake. I don't think you should put a penny into stocks or options or crypto or bonds or anything if you don't know what you're getting into. That's the number one mistake. The number two mistake is not just rushing in, but rushing into the wrong thing. Some people might want to, you know, they think they're going to, oh, you know, what the heck? So they open an account at some mom and pop exchange that's going to scam them instead of researching, you know, Binance and Kraken and Coinbase and doing it there. The other thing too is that if you want to trade and invest in crypto, you don't even have to deal with Coinbase or Binance or Kraken. Fidelity has a platform and Robinhood has a platform through which you can trade real crypto. My best bet for beginner or people who just want to invest in it is through ETFs. And that's something we obviously will be talking about in some detail later. But that's really my best approach, especially at the beginning.

Speaker 7:
[34:04] Is there a point when the IRS shows up and ruins the party, Joe?

Speaker 2:
[34:07] Always. And with crypto, when you trade crypto directly, every time you make a sale or make a payoff to someone or receive money, that's a taxable transaction. So your record keeping has to be pristine. And the second, the corollary to that is, if you use an accountant, make sure your accountant is very well versed in understanding the way crypto taxes work.

Speaker 7:
[34:35] Let's talk a little bit about investing in it then. So I buy, I decide to go with an ETF or I decide to set up an account at Coinbase. I buy one of the big ones. You mentioned I can make money on the way up and I can make money on the way down. Is this because I'm trading some type of an option on Bitcoin?

Speaker 2:
[34:55] Well you can. You know, you can do just about anything. If you're just trading and you decide to buy, let's say you have a huge account and, you know, a lot of money and like right now you have $70,000 that aren't doing anything and you think Bitcoin's bottomed. So you can buy one coin for $70,000 and you can do that through your Coinbase account or you can do that to your Fidelity account or your Robinhood account if you're lucky. And I mean that sincerely because crypto is, a lot of it is luck. If it goes up $10,000 and you want to sell it, then you hit the sell button and you got, they'll do the transfer and whatever transaction and you've got $80,000. You know, so you just made $10,000. The other hand, crypto, let's say it's at $80,000 and you decided you want to sell it short, which is crazy stuff because crypto is nuts to start with. So you're selling Bitcoin short, but you're lucky and it goes down, you know, $10,000 to $70,000 and you cover your short position at that point, then you just made $10,000. You can do the same thing with an ETF. You know, there's ETFs, you know, when crypto goes up, they go up. When crypto goes down, they go down. That's the pure trading side of it.

Speaker 7:
[36:14] Gotcha. You know, we're starting to, I know, amass some data finally around how crypto moves, because initially I know crypto was being compared to gold, like the new gold, but clearly it's not the new gold with all the volatility, Joe. So you mentioned that you like looking at charts. You like seeing how the chart moves. How really does crypto move or is it purely the Wild West speculation?

Speaker 2:
[36:40] Yes and no. Crypto has evolved into becoming the canary in the coal line for liquidity, which is the amount of money that's in the system, financial system, that's basically sloshing around. When the Fed lowers interest rates, it increases liquidity. And when it raises interest rates or does other nebulous things to tighten liquidity, the liquidity falls. So if liquidity is ample, you know there's a great way to know where it's ample or not. There's an index called the NFCI index. You can find that at the Chicago Fed's website. So it's not like there's any mystery to how much liquidity is in the system. But crypto reacts to liquidity before anything else does routinely.

Speaker 7:
[37:27] Wow. So you've got a lot of correlation then with Fed activity when it comes to watching your crypto.

Speaker 2:
[37:35] Yes and no. It's not like stocks and bonds, though. It's purely a function of liquidity. The Fed doesn't have to alter liquidity with interest rates. It can just do so by other stuff. Okay. I don't want to get into the weeds with this. But when it decides to flood the system with money, look for crypto to rise basically and the opposite.

Speaker 7:
[37:55] Gotcha. So right now, we're seeing a lot of money being taken out of the system, I would guess, just from looking at the Bitcoin chart, where it sits as we record this versus just a few months ago. I mean, Bitcoin is almost cut in half.

Speaker 2:
[38:09] Right. And it all started in October of last year of 2025. There were some rumblings of some problems in the so-called private credit arena, which is basically people will never be able to pay back their loans like the subprime thing, just a different version of that. And that started causing some trouble. And the liquidity started drying up. And so Bitcoin crashed before everything else did. But now stocks have caught up. And of course, with this war thing, you know, every day is a new day.

Speaker 7:
[38:42] Sure. Right. Right. You know, it's funny, I caution star beginners, and you're somebody that has trained a lot of beginners as well, Joe. So I'm curious about your take on this. I caution people about playing these stock market games, because, as you know, I like it for the technical aspect, like this is how you place the trade. This is how the trade moves. I get to watch all that. But I also caution people because when you're using real money, you're going to feel emotions way differently, way, way differently, and you're going to make moves differently because of those emotions. When you trade with real money, do you feel the same if somebody wanted to, you know, play with a simulator in this area?

Speaker 2:
[39:25] I think I call it, I'm an old-fashioned guy, so I call it paper trading.

Speaker 7:
[39:29] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[39:29] It's the same thing. In fact, I encourage that. I don't think you should put any real money into any investment without at least paper trading it or simulating it for a while till you get the feel of how things work. It's a layering. You have to understand a lot of things like the Fed, liquidity, all the macro stuff, the way this responds to that. The beautiful thing about cryptocurrency is it only responds to one thing. Well, actually two, liquidity and supply and demand, period. If the liquidity is ample and more people want to buy crypto, it's going to go up. It's really that simple.

Speaker 7:
[40:08] I want to ask you just a couple of questions from the very end of your book, which is, and there's so much more here, Stackers, there's so much more in Cryptocurrency 101 than we're going to be able to cover today. It was a fascinating read for me, Joe. But let's fast forward 10 years. What does crypto get right, you think, 10 years from now?

Speaker 2:
[40:26] More than anything else, it's going to offer access to people that don't have access to the financial system now. And what I mean by that is that, for example, there's a Brazilian bank called New Holdings, NU, and they're heavily into crypto. They've built an ecosystem for crypto. And so people in Brazil and throughout the world that use their services have access to cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency type transactions. Now, the number two thing, and this is kind of a little bit complex and complicated, because of stable coins needing to be backed by dollars and treasuries, that sort of saves the dollar from extinction. You know, all you hear about is, oh, we're going through the dollarization, the dollar will never will stop being the world's reserve currency. I'm going, well, yeah, maybe, but not in my lifetime, because there's this crypto thing, the stable coins. Whoever thinks about these things and puts them in motion, they're kind of scary, okay? That's all I'm going to say.

Speaker 7:
[41:37] Well, you think about the cynics who have been hanging out with us listening to this, and you were a cynic at one point, and I certainly, I remember laughing at my brother-in-law, and he's amassed a nice stack of Bitcoin just by holding and being a true believer, where I was not. But no less than Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase has talked about, there's nothing behind this, and even though they fuel the system and a lot of crypto transactions, Jamie Dimon has even said, there is this aspect of, it's the last one holding the bag, it loses. Do you see it that way or is that too cynical?

Speaker 2:
[42:15] Well, it's the same thing with stocks. Investments are risky.

Speaker 7:
[42:19] But at least with a stock, you've got Coca-Cola, they're making Coca-Cola behind it. What's behind Bitcoin?

Speaker 2:
[42:25] Someone is willing to own it. That's it. Supply and demand and liquidity. And as long as people believe that Bitcoin is a method of preserving value and doing transactions, it's been around too long now. And the government is now regulating it. And Jamie Dimon himself trying to figure out how to get into it.

Speaker 7:
[42:48] It's funny because he's saying that on one hand, Joe, and on the other hand, you look at what JP Morgan Chase does in the crypto markets. They're participating, wildly participating in the crypto markets.

Speaker 2:
[42:59] And they want control of the crypto market. That's why we can't pass any legislation. The crypto people want control, and the big banks now want control. And so that's why Congress can't pass the final bit of legislation. There's, you know, there's the three acts I talked about before which have provided some safety to this space. But it's this fight between traditional money and the DeFi group that's holding things up.

Speaker 7:
[43:27] I promised at the beginning when you said you really had to do a deep dive into all of it. You knew a lot of crypto, but you really had to be an expert to do a project like this, Joe. What really surprised you when you were writing Cryptocurrency 101?

Speaker 2:
[43:40] The depth and the complexity and what seems to be a never-ending cycle of change. If I lived another 30 years, I'd still be scratching my head going, wow, how did they think of that? My wife can't stand it. I go down the stairs and I'm scratching my head going, hey, you know what I just read, honey? And she goes, she goes, oh my God, are you going to talk about Crypto again?

Speaker 7:
[44:08] Oh, Joe, thank you so much. The book is Cryptocurrency 101 for blockchain and Bitcoin to altcoins and cryptocurrency exchanges. It's your essential guide to understanding, acquiring, and using cryptocurrency. And it was available everywhere as of yesterday, right?

Speaker 2:
[44:23] Absolutely, as of yesterday. And some places like Amazon are running specials on it so you can get it even cheaper.

Speaker 7:
[44:29] Awesome. Thank you for being such a great guide for our Crypto Curious Stackers today, Joe. I appreciate it very much.

Speaker 2:
[44:36] Thank you.

Speaker 6:
[44:42] Hey there, stackers. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug. And man, my head is spinning. Thanks to Joe Duarte for all that education. Wasn't it great? Well, one note he left for me to explain was what you call the process where the number of Bitcoin being mined is cut in half to preserve the value of the coin, but still ensure some liquidity. Bitcoin are cut in half every 210,000 blocks. And this process is called what? I'll be back right after I help Joe's mom cut her meatloaf portion size in half, so I can have some too. Wait, ma, hold up. I'll be right there.

Speaker 7:
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Speaker 8:
[46:06] K-pop demon hunters, Saja Boys' breakfast meal and Huntrix meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle.

Speaker 5:
[46:16] So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share.

Speaker 8:
[46:22] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 5:
[46:24] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 1:
[46:25] No, really, stop.

Speaker 8:
[46:27] You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 1:
[46:34] I participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 6:
[47:10] Hey there, stackers, I'm Portion Splitter, and meatloaf aficionado, Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug. Joe Duarte shared how Bitcoin mining works. As a part of this, every 210,000 blocks that are mined, the blocks are cut in half. What is this process called? I know it sounds amazing, but the process of cutting in half the Bitcoin blocks is called, wait for it, halving. They probably had a company offsite in Cancun come up with that one. I mean, that took some thinking, which is a little different than my Bitcoin strategy, which I refer to as have-notting. What's cool, though, is that Joe uses this process to pay me. He halves my pay every 50 episodes. Apparently, he says this raises the value of my pay because it becomes scarcer. The dollars in my bank account are worth more than yours because there aren't as many of them. Based on the fact that I have $12, I am wealthy beyond measure. Every one of those dollars has to be worth millions at this point, right? I don't think those losers at Starbucks, though, understand my bank account because, I mean, just not everybody understands money, right? So just don't complain. Just go with it. And now, back to the guys with the second half. See what I did there? I'm not supposed to pronounce the L, but anyway, it's Joe and OG.

Speaker 7:
[48:39] Hey, let's dive into a headline.

Speaker 4:
[48:41] Hello, darlings.

Speaker 5:
[48:42] And now it's time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins Headlines.

Speaker 7:
[48:47] Well, stackers, today OG and I are going to dive into something nobody wants to talk about, but everybody eventually pays for, long-term care because, OG, according to a new AARP report, the cost of care, get this, you buckled up, the cost of care has jumped nearly 50, five zero percent since only 2019, which is about, by the way, everybody the same rate. My stress level goes up whenever OG says, let's run the numbers. So we got a big, big number there. Here are some of the details in that, OG, we're going to ask you about what's really going on here. Costs are exploding faster than income, care cost, as I mentioned, up 50% versus income up way less. Typical retiree income is around $60,000 a year. Home care alone is over $50,000 a year, even if you just need partial care for a little bit of time. Median savings for somebody who's over 75 years old in America is $50,000 in total. So, gee, that's about one year of care or less. 80% of people are going to need at least somebody on an interim, maybe short-term basis to help them. So about 80% of people end up touching this problem at one point in our life. So I want to be clear here. This isn't a rich person problem, because I think when we talk about long-term care, people think we're talking about insurance and just protecting assets. Well, this is basically everybody's problem. So let's start here. Are we all just one bad hip away, OG, from some financial chaos in our life? Wow.

Speaker 4:
[50:31] You had to make it personal for all the hip replacement people out there.

Speaker 7:
[50:35] I think that includes most people in my family.

Speaker 4:
[50:37] Yeah. I think what you identified there is kind of the crux of the issue. It's identifying or recognizing, I think, maybe that long-term care, when we say it, we might immediately jump to insurance. But it's really, what's the likelihood of needing some assisted care with some amount of frequency at some point in time in your lifetime? That doesn't mean, it could mean full on like, I have dementia, I can't do anything for myself. It could also mean like my grandparents where they were 95 and they just had somebody stop by every three days to go, are you guys still good? Do you need anything? Everybody's still up and moving around like, okay, cool. And that's a continuum of care that goes from, I don't need anything to I need everything. And the reality is, is that we're all going to fall somewhere in there. What's interesting as I see this just kind of transpire in my family right now, a lot of this is born by the next generation, which by the way, if you're thinking about when do I need this care, it's probably not 70, although it can be. It's probably 90, okay? And so how old are the people in the next generation when you're 90 or 95?

Speaker 7:
[52:00] Yeah. And before we even get to that, I mean, there's three options here, because I had written down three when I was reading this. I'm like, how do most people handle this? Because we all plan on cruises during retirement, but we don't plan on somebody to help us get dressed. So option A that you kind of glossed over a little bit is we just hope it doesn't happen to us. Well, we just went over 80% of people are going to touch this in some way. So that's not a strategy. Number two-

Speaker 4:
[52:25] And more if you look at a couple, right? If you say a couple age 65, what's the likelihood of that one of them needs some amount of care? And when you said, wish it away, okay, that's probably not going to happen. I want to talk about who's given the care to the one person who does need it. And I think this is kind of where you're going.

Speaker 7:
[52:44] Well, and that is number two is that the kids will handle it. And when you're thinking about 90, right?

Speaker 4:
[52:50] Or it's your spouse, right? Yeah, I mean, like, you're 92, your spouse is 94.

Speaker 7:
[52:55] Like, I just happened across the road from me. Bill, who lived across the road, his lovely spouse, Jane, got dementia. He ended up taking care of her. And I will tell you, the five years I lived across the road from them, you saw him age dramatically in those five years, being a caregiver in his mid 80s.

Speaker 4:
[53:19] Right. Some family support, basically. Either it's your spouse or your kids. And if it's your kids, your kids are 70 by the time you're 95.

Speaker 7:
[53:26] Yeah, I'm 21 years younger than mom. So for me, if mom's 85, the third one is the old Medicaid is going to take care of it. OG, spend everything, qualify, hope for the best.

Speaker 4:
[53:38] Yeah. And these programs exist for people that can't afford to pay for it on their own, right? The state has a system. Every state's different in terms of how it works. But largely, there's the requirement that you have to be pretty broke. You have to have spent nearly all of your money. You're allowed to keep a little bit of cash. You're allowed to keep the equity in your house. You're allowed to keep one vehicle. And the rest of it has to be consumed before you qualify. And I'm not, look, I don't want to throw a shade on people who are doing this work because, you know, A, it's super thankless, right? Because generally speaking, the people you're caring for don't have the aptitude necessarily to like, oh, wow, this is really nice of you to like help me get dressed today.

Speaker 7:
[54:24] Thank you so much on a consistent basis.

Speaker 4:
[54:26] Yeah. And more likely than not, it's the exact opposite, right? There's anger and frustration and rebellion and like, it's not a job that gets a lot of grace. But when you've got something that's run by the state, you know, even the great state of Texas, you know, it's still run by the state. And how do state contracts get doled out? You don't have to think too hard to recognize that this is not like a really, really, really high touch operation, right? This is gonna be, what's the minimum amount of support that we can provide that dots the I and crosses the T's. And again, I'm not saying the people, this is not a people thing, because the people who do this work are caring and loving, and like I said, it's very thankless. But they just don't have the support. The state of Texas is not spending a bunch of money going, hey, let's make sure that we've got lap pools for people, and really nice homes for people to age gracefully in, because that's what we should do as a society. They go, how do we fund this to the least of our abilities? It's just what it is, right? And every state's the same way, and the federal government's the same. So, what did, I was watching a Goggins thing, weird transition, but you know who David Goggins is? He's a little out there.

Speaker 7:
[55:47] Personal accountability swears a ton.

Speaker 4:
[55:49] Yeah, well, what I saw the other day was he was raging against something, and he's like, nobody's coming to save you. And this is kind of one of those things, right? Like long-term care discussions, long-term care coverage, and I don't mean insurance, but you need to have a plan in place of how are we going to take care of health care needs in retirement. Fidelity suggests that that number is 300K per family in retirement, not including the cost of assisted care. So if your plan does not account for this, I think you're missing a big piece. And now look, at the end of the day, if you've got 10 million bucks and you're spending within your, you're going to be fine. But the vast majority of people that are retiring, we talk to that are kind of in that one to three million range and, hey, things are good. We got social security, we got two and a half million in the bank. We're feeling pretty comfortable. We need to have a plan also for, what do we have to do here for some level of assisted care down the line?

Speaker 7:
[56:50] And I think that gets back to the crux of this. A lot of people don't want to think about it because they don't want to think about insurance because often people in the industry bring up insurance. We really want to widen this out to, I just need a plan. So I like that you're doing that. And I think that there's three ways to go. And what I'd like to do, OG, is walk through these three. The first one, you mentioned the person with $10 million. That person could easily do what we call self-funding. They just go, you know what? I'm going to put this money aside. It's going to self-fund whatever amount of time, whatever probability, and I've got it in the bank.

Speaker 4:
[57:25] Yeah. I mean, you can look this up in your area, but just take, and you've, I don't know what you said. You're looking at AARP. Sorry, I'm not a member, so I don't know the exact acronym. Maybe you can quote me on it. You can get it for me.

Speaker 7:
[57:37] Well, I think it's going to be important, OG, that people look at this in their home state because it doesn't quote one, but on purpose. Listen to this. AARP says, long-term care costs vary widely by location with services ranging from home care to nursing homes costing twice as much than the most expensive states. By the way, this will be Maine, West Virginia and Oregon. Three states you wouldn't think of is high-cost of living areas, Maine. I don't think of that as high-cost of living, or in the least costly ones, Louisiana, Maryland, Utah, and Texas. Again, like Maryland, I don't think of that as a low-cost of living area, but long-term care generally not as expensive there. It says that you really want to look at this locally because it truly is much more of a local number than you and I quoting a single across-the-board number.

Speaker 4:
[58:26] Yeah. Genworth, which is an insurance company, they do an annual cost of care study, and you can look at your specific area, your specific state to get an idea. Just for argument's sake, say it's $10,000 a month. Just to put some numbers in terms of what we're talking about here, the average stay is roughly two and a half years. You're talking about $300,000, $280,000, $300,000, and that's for one person. I think that's a pretty safe bet. If you've got X millions of dollars in the bank, and you say, okay, I'm going to carve out this $300,000, this is going to be for my assisted care. Or like we've talked about, longevity annuities, this starts paying me when I'm 85 years old or when this triggering event happens. This is the purpose of those things. I don't think you need to buy an annuity, I'm just saying like that's one way to set it aside and saying like, okay, I have 10 million in the bank, I can carve out $400,000 into a separate brokerage account, let it grow, and if I ever need it, that's where it's there for.

Speaker 7:
[59:25] It is so difficult for the average family to be able to do that. On the other side, you have insurance, you got self-funding on one side, you've got the other field goal for football fans, you've got the other side of this completely, which is just give it all to an insurance company. That can largely, OG, take it off the table, but as you know, because of the way that states get regulated and because of the problems that insurance companies have and regulators have. Regulators' job is to make sure that there's not this explosion in coverage cost. Seeing costs go up as quickly as they are, insurance companies go, hey, we got to move the needle up quicker to cover our costs. Companies have compromised over the years, which means that you see companies that have gotten out of this. A ton of companies have gotten out of it because of the struggle to keep up. You also see people that have purchased coverages have gone, well, wait a minute, the cost of just keeping this insurance has gone up. This ends up being expensive and complex, but still incredibly useful if you can afford it.

Speaker 4:
[60:31] Yeah, it's not inexpensive, but when you think about the whole way insurance is priced based on the likelihood of it happening and the cost of the event occurring, if it does occur, and you say, okay, well, we just established that maybe it costs $300,000, and we've said that it's a one in two chance. The math is pretty straightforward. If you got a 50 percent chance of losing 300 grand, how much is the insurance?

Speaker 7:
[60:57] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[60:58] If you told me it's 150 grand plus or minus interest rates, I would go, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 7:
[61:02] Now you're capping the cost. You're going, you know what? I am out of pocket this. I hope I'm out of pocket, much like your car insurance. You're like, I hope I never use it, but I'm capping the cost at this exorbitant number.

Speaker 4:
[61:13] Yeah. That's assuming to your point that they don't raise the rates. They don't come back to you later and say, hey, by the way, you thought you recovered for this, but we need to make an adjustment and cover you at a lower amount to keep this policy in force or you can pay us another 50 grand to top it up basically because we did our calculations wrong, or because the marketplace increased at a rate that we didn't expect. Which is what we're seeing a lot of, or God forbid, they just get completely out of the business altogether, and then they go, yeah, our bad, sorry. In which case, that's a big giant mess.

Speaker 7:
[61:45] Usually, by the way, in every case that I've seen, if they get out of it, so if you have long-term care today, right now and you just heard what we were talking about, companies getting out of it, every case that I've ever seen, OG, they sell it to another company. Like some other company comes along and buys the coverage, so it won't be without coverage, but it might end up being a little different. Yeah, a different thing. Which is why I think there can be such problems on both ends. You and I chatting about this in the past, for most of our stackers, there's this hybrid approach where it might be part you take on some of the risk, dedicate some of your assets, you might have some coverage, but also that might have an Achilles heel. If this happens, well, then we're going to have to dedicate more assets, but also maybe some family discussions as well, like all three. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[62:36] Again, back to solving the problem, which is to say if we know that this thing is a probability and we know how much it's going to cost, just bake it into your financial plan and say, where do we blow up? Can I cover it all? Yes or no? If not, how much can I cover? How much should I transfer to the third party? And I think it's very reasonable to say, you know what, if I need to have some care for a period of time, you know, my final six months of life, my final year of life, I'm okay with writing that check. Like the plan is successful and I still have enough money. What I'm trying to avoid personally is, and I maybe date myself just to skosh here, but the Ronald Reagan, right? He was in an assisted care for nine years because of Alzheimer's and memory care, right? So he didn't have the ailment of the physical nature where it's like, oh, you're just gonna, you know, eventually pass away and this is kind of a pre-hospice type of scenario, right? It was, no, he's very healthy and he's completely lost his mind. And we need to take care of him to the tune of, you know, $15,000 a month or $20,000 a month, full on assisted care, 100% care, 24 hour daycare for 10 years. If that happens to me, I want my family to be okay. I don't want them to go bankrupt. I don't want them to have to make the choice of, sorry, dad, you know, you had this really cool place, but now we're going to this other place and maybe not as cool. But have you seen Landman, like season two? Like I don't want to be like Sam Elliott, Landman, you know.

Speaker 7:
[64:09] Everybody quotes Landman and I still have not seen it.

Speaker 4:
[64:13] You haven't seen it, okay. So, you know, at the beginning of season two, he reconnects with his dad and his dad's in this panhandle assisted care facility, you know, out in, you know, Amarillo or something like that. And it looks just like you expect it would. And again, no shade to the people, just say in the environment. But I want to cover that. I want to make sure, hey, you know, I worked really hard. I've got a great net worth. I don't want to burn it up into the tune of, you know, a quarter million a year of extra cost, because here's the thing. It's double the cost. And the reason I say that is because if my spouse is still alive, which she's going to outlive me by 20 years, it's like, now she's got to pay for me and she's got to pay for herself. You know what I mean? And so it's not like, oh, well, you're just going to swap out those expenses, just sell the house. And it's like, well, no, mom still needs to live in the house and pay for all that. And while dad is burning 12 grand a month at the memory care facility for 15 or 10 years, you know, so I want to cover the known risk. I want to transfer the risk of the catastrophic-ness to a third party. And that's personally how I think makes the most sense for where we are personally in our lives. But I think this is true for just about all insurances, right? Same thing with car insurance. I want to cover the easy risk. If we get a fender bender, no problem. 2,500 bucks, I'll fix that. But I don't want to have to buy a new car because I got smashed into on the highway and I'm out 60 grand of a new truck.

Speaker 7:
[65:42] A ton of money, you're right. It's scary because, you know, you stop thinking about long-term care for 15 minutes and then AARP puts this report right back in your face, OG, which shows you cannot not think about this. Really, if you don't have a plan, you just have a plan. It's a really bad one. I will link to it in our show notes page at stackybenjamins.com. We also have a newsletter called The 201, where Kevin Bailey dives into topic like this one and what Joe Duarte talked about today, crypto and all the different things, generally with a hot take, had some great hot takes lately about, why do we spend so much money on impressing other people? Going back to Jim Murphy last week, OG, like why do we spend a crap load of money just impressing somebody else when Jim Murphy is like, the only person you got to impress is what's going on inside, be the best version of you that you possibly can. If you missed Jim on the show, great guest. I want to go back to the back porch for just a moment before we say goodbye. I don't keep up with this every week, but it's one of my favorite pieces of our Facebook group, The Basement. I ask, what was one thing you really messed up this week to make your life harder, more miserable, more broke, less efficient? It's always, sometimes we get all braggy, braggy online, so I think it's very fun to share, hey, this did not go my way. I wanted to share some of these because, stackers, you guys just brought the humanity to the personal finance section of the world. Ken says, how many times have you done this, OG? He said, bought some chicken and arugula on Saturday for about 15 bucks. We planned to cook it on Thursday. Well, I didn't check the dates. They were both spoiled. We had to run back out and buy more. Wasted time, money, had a late dinner. Ken, I wouldn't have went out and bought more. We were going out to dinner. Even though it wasn't in the budget, we were going out to dinner if that happened. How many times does that happen?

Speaker 4:
[67:38] Chicken goes bad? I didn't know that.

Speaker 7:
[67:40] What?

Speaker 4:
[67:42] I know coleslaw does, right?

Speaker 7:
[67:44] Yeah, okay, that might be a little too close to home.

Speaker 4:
[67:47] Too soon?

Speaker 7:
[67:47] Yes. Glenn took a trip to Aruba. We had Arugula and now we have Aruba. And he gives us this BS picture of people on a beach in this beautiful, like two clouds in the sky picture. Took this trip to Aruba, better life, but more broke now.

Speaker 4:
[68:05] I mean, I don't know that that's better. Or that's too bad.

Speaker 7:
[68:10] Drew had a work conference in May at a hotel, waited too long to book at the hotel, so had to book somewhere else, then found a cheaper, closer hotel, had to call and try to cancel, get a refund for 15 minutes. Wasted time and energy. I had a time. Have you ever forgotten to buy the plane ticket until like the day before? I've done that one, OG. That's not pretty.

Speaker 4:
[68:28] You know, I accept the chaos that goes with booking at the last minute because I don't like to plan stuff in advance. As I'm literally booking a ticket right now, today's Monday that we're recording this, I am booking a ticket for Friday afternoon right now. So it's not terribly last minute. But according to my page here, there are three tickets left.

Speaker 7:
[68:52] Oh, I had a last minute ticket to fly to Toronto for a strategic coach meeting. And to get from here to Toronto, which is, I was living in Detroit at the time, what truly was like what, a five-hour drive, was going to be, I think, 1,600 bucks. So I'm scrambling and I thought, how am I going to make this work? So I'm like, oh, I'll take the Amtrak. Well, Amtrak got rid of the commuter rail service with Canadian Via Rail, the connection. So I was going to have to go from Detroit to Chicago, Chicago to Buffalo, and then Buffalo up to Niagara, and then across and over. It was going to take me two days to get there via train. The good news was it was going to be like 85 bucks, but it was going to take me two days.

Speaker 4:
[69:44] You're shoveling coal for two days.

Speaker 7:
[69:47] So this was awesome. So I look at the Via Rail, which is right across the border, which for us living in Detroit, it was like a 40 minute drive, park, park in Windsor, and then take the Via Rail from Windsor. Well, if anybody's taken a train in Canada, like this, this is amazing. I look at it, it's going to be 30 bucks, OG, for the ticket. So then I go, well, heck, I could go, what does first class cost? First class, $80. They feed you on fine China plates. You get all the Canadian, the area around St. Catharines has wine. It's great white wine country. They serve you all the wine you can drink while you're on the train, and they have high-speed internet. I'm working, I'm listening to music, I'm drinking white wines. It was fantastic. If we get that in the US, really good. There's a few more here if you want to dive in too. We have a lot of fun in Mom's Basement, stackingbenjamins.com/basement, if you want to join the discussion with all the other stackers. If you are wondering, how am I doing with money versus everybody else? You know what's incredible is that we all wonder. This was the most popular question I got when I was a financial planner. How am I doing versus everybody else?

Speaker 4:
[71:06] Right.

Speaker 7:
[71:07] Well, the real question is how am I doing versus how I should be doing? OG and his team have created a scorecard that they talked about on Monday, that you can go get your score, stackingbenjamins.com/scorecard, see how you're doing and not versus everybody else, but versus how maybe you should be doing with your money. All right, that's going to do it for today. Doug, wrap this up, man. What should we have learned on today's show?

Speaker 6:
[71:31] So what's stacked up on our to-do list for today? First, take some advice from Joe Duarte. Thinking about investing in crypto, start small and begin with the big coins. It's easy to get burned and there's a lot to know. So starting slowly can make sure you're not burning Benjamins instead of stacking them. Second, long-term care. Yup, time to plan for that. But the big lesson? Don't ask Joe's mom if she wants to take a cue from Joe Duarte and have the laundry chore. She'll tell you that for this, it works backwards. And if I do double, it's better for everyone. Confused? You and me both, man. Thanks to Joe Duarte for joining us today. If you want the lowdown on cryptocurrency without all the hype, try his book, the latest in the 101 series of financial books, Cryptocurrency 101. We'll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. This show is the property of SP Podcast LLC copyright 2026 and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You'll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube, and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, 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, Doug, and we'll see you next time back here at The Stacking Benjamins Show.

Speaker 7:
[74:00] I got this email, OG, out of the blue. And for people that don't know, the day after Thanksgiving, we do, on Black Friday, we do a board game episode, because it used to be nobody listened to the show on Black Friday, they were all spending money. So I decided to make it games that teach you about money, or games that aren't a waste of money, that you can play with a family over the holidays. How often do you go to Target and you find a game that sucks? So imagine my surprise when I get this email from this group called Hegemonic Project Games. And these are a bunch of European economists who have created some games around how economics work. And they said, hey, would you like to review this game? Well, what's funny is a lot of times people send me a game OG, because they know I play games. I really don't want to play test your new game. I'm a little bougie about the game. I'm like, no, I don't. But this game, and I can't pronounce this word, is it hegemony? Hegemony.

Speaker 4:
[75:02] Where's Doug? I think Doug should answer this.

Speaker 7:
[75:05] He's upstairs on dish duty.

Speaker 4:
[75:07] Sure. Hegemony.

Speaker 7:
[75:08] Yes.

Speaker 4:
[75:09] Hegemony.

Speaker 7:
[75:11] Hegemony? I don't know. This idea of different classes want different things in an economy, and they actually created a game, but I'd heard of this game. And actually, one of our stackers a couple years ago had this in their list of games to teach about money, because they liked it so much. But while I like personal finance, the idea of economics generally feels so far out of our pay grade that I want nothing to do with it. But I had read that this was a good game. And look at, I'm showing OG the bottom of the box right now, if you're watching us on YouTube. Look at all the different awards this game's won. It is one heavy game of the year, thematic game of the year, innovative game of the year, game of the year, game of the year, all these places giving it best strategy, year-old game, but most thematic game, best expert game. So I said, yes, send it to me. And I'd love to try it out and then talk about what happened. And by the way, cool thing, not only did they send me the game, they didn't expect me to talk positively about it. They're like, just talk about it.

Speaker 4:
[76:08] Hopefully they did. Why wouldn't they think that you were gonna do-

Speaker 7:
[76:10] Well, no, they want me to, but they're not like, hey, I'm only sending you the game if you say good stuff about it.

Speaker 4:
[76:17] Tell us the truth is what you're saying.

Speaker 7:
[76:19] So I played it the last two days. So number one, this one, Board Game Geek, the biggest website for board games online, gave this heavy game of the year. OG, this game put the heavy in heavy. And the reason it's heavy is because everybody's doing something different. The learning curve on this game, it took me an hour to explain the rules to this game. Both times I explained it. The first time Cheryl and I played it. The next time I played it with my friends, John and Troy. None of them are interested in economics. Each person plays a different faction. So in the first game, I was the capitalist. My job was to make companies and employ people. Cheryl played the working class. Her job was to work at my companies, try to get a living wage, educate her people, make them healthier, get them health care, and basically make their lives better. She formed trade unions to protect her interest. One time she went on strike because I wasn't paying her enough. So she sent one of my companies on strike. You have things like tariffs in the game. Our tariff was always medium, but we could have gotten rid of it completely, or we could have had high tariffs. We can also have business deals and foreign things where I'm selling the goods that I make to other companies. I have to pay Cheryl to make the good. Once you get beyond the one hour, and I've learned a lot of games and our rules, like usually I'm like, I'm out, the game's not gonna be worth it. OG, once we got beyond the hour and we started playing, the game was, it was so fun. It was just so fun as she's going on strike, as she is trying to make sure that she's got enough stuff for people to do, that she's getting a living wage. It was fun for me to try to decrease the minimum wage. Like we have these laws that we're passing. I'm trying to get my taxes down because the more money I pay in taxes, the less I can pay. So as Cheryl's demanding higher wages, I'm trying to pass laws so that I have to send less money to the state. By the way, the state has its own coffers. And if the government goes under, it's chaos for all of us. So in some ways, we're working together. I need her people to run my factory. And there were times she didn't want to send her people to my factory. She was voting for the state to open up more state run companies so that she wouldn't have to deal with my low pay. But on the other side, the more companies the state opened, the worse the state's treasury got because they weren't very efficient at running companies. And so they had to build this company and build all this infrastructure.

Speaker 4:
[79:08] How many explosions are in this game?

Speaker 7:
[79:11] It was so funny. We talked about it for about an hour afterwards. And then we played it the next day. My buddies, John and Troy, when I told them it's going to be an hour to learn the game, they're like, oh God. And then we get halfway through the game. My buddy Troy, who doesn't like any of this stuff, goes, okay, you know how much I don't like business games. And you know how much I don't care about economics. He goes, this game is a five on a scale of one to five. It was so damn fun. It was so sweet. So if you can get by the mountain of rules. But this is interesting. What Cheryl said is that by playing a game like this, we might get a little bit more empathetic about somebody else's situation. Because Cheryl's like, you know, I've never been particularly pro-union in my life. I'm not anti-union. I work in a field where there aren't unions, but you just hear, you know, this anti-union. And she goes, when I had to play that part, I got why unions exist, like I understood it. And for me, I'm like, I want people to get a decent wage. But dude, when I'm the capitalist, and I've got to make sure my company makes money so that the company can survive, I'm trying to lower every cost I can just to stay afloat. And everybody's accusing me, OG, of making, Cheryl's accusing me of making money hand over fist. But at the end of every round when I'm paying out wages, all my money went bye-bye. Like every single round, I made a bunch of money and then I lost it all to all these taxes, wages, all these other overhead costs. And so I think that this game made us all, because John and Troy and I had the same experience, it made us all more empathetic about maybe the other point of view, and that somebody might be looking at a different side of the cube than you are. So if you don't mind a heavy game, I can see why this game has won so many awards. Hegemony, thank you so much for these Economist Hegemony project for sending it to me. When I saw how long it was going to be to learn, I was like, oh god, what did I get myself into? But what a phenomenal game, OG.