Transcription
Very few of us can even comprehend what billions of dollars feels like. But there's that aspiration to want to be better. If I can, for 20, 30 bucks, steal or borrow or utilize some of the principles that the ultra-wealthy have done to keep money and pass it on, I'm going to want that.
Wealthy people don't do this. Prince didn't have a trust. James Gandalfini, the actor, didn't have a trust. Howard Hughes didn't have a trust. That was a 20-year debacle because he didn't have direct heirs. A lot of the money gets just spent on courts. I even had someone in Europe that they basically paid a 70% tax rate on their inheritance because of lack of planning.
Derek Gunderson is a 10-time author, Wall Street Journal bestselling financial educator.
He has personally spent time with 23 billionaires to decode how the ultra-wealthy build dynasties that last generations.
And today, he's breaking down the exact three-step method the Rockefellers used,
including the step most people never even know exists.
Step one is the living trust. Step two is getting life insurance, whether it's term or whole life.
The Rockefellers, they can make a lot of money. They've done very well in oil, but they still chose to do this, which had a lower projected return than their own business because they know they don't control when someone dies in their family. They don't control the economic conditions. So, this helps them replenish anytime they have this economic loss because every Rockefeller that's born, the family goes, "That's an asset. We're going to invest in that person. We're going to help them be part of this entire empire." The core of the Rockefeller method is insurance and trust. Then we talked about the next thing, which is...
"All right, Garrett."
"What's up, man? Welcome back, man."
"Good to be back."
"You just brought the house down at Tom Wall's event. We're both here. Uh, you're speaking. I'm not. I'm running the podcast. I'm the podcast sponsor. And, uh, so first and foremost, would love to get kind of the cliff notes on some of the things that you talked about. Um, you're really in tune with content. You're obviously doing a lot of speaking. Um, I really want to spend time talking about the Rockefeller concept because that's questions we get and I want people to walk away figuring out like how can they take what the Rockefellers did and how they apply it to their own life. But before we get into that, we'd love to just hear like, what's, what are you currently thinking about seeing online? What are you, yeah, what's what's happening in your world?"
"Yeah, my wife and I were having a conversation and she was like, 'I'm really worried about our kids being able to afford a home.' And I was like, 'Okay.' Okay. She's like, 'Yeah, I mean, with inflation and real estate prices.' I said, 'Well, we kind of have this plan. Let's do a retreat with the family and let's unveil the plan. Why don't we finance the kids' homes and then when we die, like that'll pay back whatever we financed. And then when they pay, they'll be paying to the trust. And the trust will earn the interest rather than a bank. And then every time they make a payment, it will benefit their kids because it's building the trust that will then finance that and we'll never have to use a bank in our family again. We can just finance through it. And if they sell within 5 years, we'll split the equity in the trust. If they wait for 5 years and they sell the home, they can keep all the proceeds on the gains. But think no loan origination fee, a competitive interest rate that would be lower than what they'd pay at a bank, but still has to be a certain interest rate to meet certain criteria, you know, to be considered a loan, having it be a tax write-off for them on the interest, all that kind of stuff.' She's like, 'Wow, that's that's a great idea.' So then we unveiled it to the kids. I think it took a little bit of pressure off them because I don't want to provide so much that they don't have purpose, but I don't want their purpose to diminish because they circumvent and shortcut what they really want to do to get into a career and make money just for benefits, just for income instead of finding what really matters to them. So, I don't want to like, I think the problem is people that inherit money and don't know what to do in life are pretty miserable. People that would have made the money on their own, but it, it just helps them with basic things. Like we put in our family constitution, 'Hey, if they have an entrepreneurial pursuit, we'll go ahead and fund up to 10% of that.' And that gives them a little bit of a, you know, head start. If they host family retreats, we'll pay for the family retreats within the trust because it's keeping the family cohesive and together. If they get education outside of the classroom, we'll be willing to pay for up to 50% of that if they attend and get value from it. If they choose not to attend, they would have to pay the trust back before they could get more money for the next pursuit because we want them to finish what they start and be calculated what they do. And so we just created this entire framework with our kids that they could be like, 'Oh, like we have a little bit of support. We're not completely on our own.' And at the same time, if they don't do anything, there's nothing there for them. There is no..."
"You're not, you're not, and you're not funding laziness or non-value creation, but you're, you're creating a backstop to say, 'Hey, I don't want to put the pressure because we've done well. Well, we've done well as a family. I, Gary Gunderson, have provided a ton of value and I want my family to benefit from that, but I don't want to enable bad behavior.'"
"Right? And I told them it's a meritocracy. Meaning, hey, one of you might get more money than the other from the trust because you might have a pursuit that requires that extra money. And one might end up with a bigger home or nicer home than the other because they have the financial wherewithal because they still have to go through basic underwriting criteria which we have outlined in our family constitution. Right? But instead of taking 3 months to get a loan and interest rates might spike right at that time or banks might start scaling back like we saw in 2008, they can actually get that which would give them a huge advantage because number one, if they're buying a house with cash, they're actually going to be able to get a better price. When I bought my cabin, there were two other people that were making an offer. Ours was the lowest offer, but our offer said we'll close in 9 days. And so we got it because they just, they, they had actually had a 40-day contract and in day 39 the other people cancelled and got their money back. So she was already kind of like worn out. So I said, 'Look, we'll close in 9 days. I just borrowed it from my cash value. We paid it in full and then we just got a line of credit against it.'"
"I was going to ask you, so you now have a line of credit so it's not like all your equity is is tied up. I have two properties that are, one cabin that's really small with a pond and then a bigger cabin with less land. And the other walking distance is beautiful. Yeah, I actually paid, I, I pull out cash value for both of them. One is free and clear right now. And one I've actually used a million dollars on my line of credit because I used it to pay back some cash value because I had an interest rate at 2% for a while and cash value interest rate on one of my loans was 8%. And then I also used it to invest 200 grand in a coach because it was just the best money to do that without taking from the business. So I've used it, but at the same time, I'm fine if I just pay it off because I can go back and forth. My issue with lines of credit, they're not the best liquidity because when banks get tight, they could easily reduce that. We've seen this with credit cards recently where people's limits are just getting cut and they're like, 'Oh, wait. I thought I had that money available and it's not available.' They could do the same thing with a line of credit, but it's still nice that I was able to move quick. I was able to have it and now I still have access to that cash."
"Right. Right. And you could have easily, if you wanted to, refinanced. You, you make, you get the offer, you get in and you could have refinanced if you wanted to."
"And then I'm not under pressure of like deadlines and because when I bought my house, interest rates were at 2.75%. So for me, I'm like, don't care whether I could pay cash or not. I can outdo 2.75% in my cash value with, especially like there's almost no risk in that and I get the death benefit and I get all these additional benefits. So it, but I had a deadline. I had 30 days."
"Yes. And I had to pay full price because there was a cash offer and that cash offer was an investment group that wanted to buy it and use it as like a retreat. And I just, you know, fortunately I knew the person that was selling the home was actually the realtor and my wife's best friend knew her. So we just said, 'Hey, we're a family moving in there. Like, we're good for the money.' And, you know, it was a lot of work. I, I made sure to close in 3 weeks, but it was like every day checking with underwriting, getting them everything they need. It was a huge undertaking in the middle of a lot going on in my life."
"Why do you think what would the Rockefellers book that you wrote is one of the best performing books when it comes to life insurance category? Like why when you wrote it, you couldn't have imagined that the book was going to be like one of the best sellers?"
"Out of my 10 books, I would expect it to be in the middle at best, not the best seller."
"There's a couple reasons. One is it's interesting to see stories and hear stories like Rockefellers versus Vanderbilts and posing that question, 'What would they do?' That's, I don't know what would they do? How did they get seven generations? What, you know? There's an, it's like people want to answer the question that's been asked. And I like the subtitle, 'How the wealthy get and stay that way, and how you can too.' So a lot of people don't know what the wealthy do and they want to understand that. And I think that I just made it so easy to read. This, the MC at this event, his mom came over and said, 'I heard you speak last year. I've been buying the book, giving it out to everyone, letting them know they can have generational wealth, not just lose it all. And no matter where you're starting.' She's like, 'I, you know, I just started with some term insurance, but I'm, I'm on the path. Next year, I hope to tell you that I got my whole life.' Like, she's really excited about it and wants to share it because it's such an easy read. I'm not using language that people feel like, 'I don't understand this. That's too complicated.' And even when I record the audiobook, it was so easy to record because it's how I would speak and it was just like very natural. And the new version, which I updated in 2023, for a couple reasons. One is I've just had new insight. You know, this family legacy rings, which is family office, which is a cohesive family, you know, team for the family on the financial side. Family retreat, which is how you invest in your heirs. And then family constitution, which is capturing the essence of your family in words in a heartfelt way so people know why this trust exists and how it's going to continue to work. I think that it's just like, 'Oh, this is, I see through the matrix when I read it. It's, it's really easy. 2,700 plus organic reviews. I've never asked anyone to review that book. And 4.6 as a life insurance book because life insurance is just a part of the book. It's the bigger conversation of legacy. So whether it's the story of sharing like how my kids could have a house and not have to worry about the inflation because of the things that we started. And I'm a coal miner's son. I didn't, I didn't inherit money. I didn't come from money. I had to figure this out. But because I didn't know much about money as a kid, all I knew is that my family was scared of it. Like you had to hold on to it. You had to budget. You had to like cling to it because you never know if it could go away because my great-grandfather, when his wife got pregnant, couldn't provide and came to America and didn't get to see his daughter until she was already born and had to go across the ocean and get on a train. I mean, that is a long journey that feels really risky. So, kind of like as folklore in my family, it was like, you got to hold on. You could lose your loved ones. You can not have enough money to to buy things. And so that scarcity mindset had infiltrated. And so we were responsible from a scarce standpoint. And I was like, well, the wealthy don't operate the way that my family does. So I leveraged my young age. And I just started to interview people that I thought were wealthy, which when I was 19 was like, who has a nice house, you know, who has nice cars. But then I started to just realize, hey, I can get in through my professors to really wealthy people that they know that are donors for the university. And if I'm willing to contribute and ask questions, they like it. So I fortunately met a, a money manager that was a now a professor who really was my tutor and mentor about how money worked and I just started to see this entire different world. And when I first got an MDRT award, I'm young."
"Million Dollar Round Table."
"Yeah, Million Dollar Round Table. I get this award. I'm really proud of whatever the certificate is and feeling really good. And I walk out in the hallway and this woman, Nancy, is like, 'Oh, that's awesome. Congratulations. I can't wait till you get to the top of the table because they just view money completely differently.' I was like, 'What do you mean?' She goes, 'Well, can we have a conversation?' I'm like, 'Yeah.' So, she asked me questions like, 'What's your philosophy on this?' And 'What do you think about that?' And at about, I don't know, 5 minutes in, she goes, 'I wonder what it's like building the financial prison that you built for your wife.' Because I believed money was something to hold on to, but no one shrinks their way to wealth. And when I realized I was coming from scarcity, because that's what was handed down as a blueprint for my family, then I was like, 'Oh, I've got to keep asking and learning.' And so I started to study the ultra-high net worth and be like, 'Oh, wait. They view things from a completely different, not, not different opposite standpoint.' And that was kind of what led to the Rockefeller method and studying these wealthy families, but I always had this thing of like, 'What is it that they do that anyone can do?' Because there's things they do that you can't necessarily do. Yeah."
"Like I spent time with 23 billionaires and what I find is they're really good at other people's time. They leverage that, right? They hire people. Other people's money. They're still raising funds even though they've gotten the capital. That's interesting. And then other people's ability because they, they need ability that they don't have. You think of these stories of like Steve Jobs. He couldn't build an iPhone. He needs Steve Wozniak to do it, but he had the vision. And so I started to recognize, okay, not everybody can apply all that, but they could apply some of that. And, you know, anyone, no matter how much money they have or don't have, a trust is important because it keeps your assets private. It avoids probate. It could, you know, it gives a set of instructions so it doesn't just land in the next generation's lap or, you know, there's a number of things. I'm like, so what's the simplest version that impacts anyone and plant the seeds of the more complex things that you have to be at a certain level to do? But by dissecting that, I think that people are like, 'Wait, I have hope. I can read what Rockefellers and be like, 'Wait, this is so practical. I have to set up a trust and I have to get insurance and this is the type of insurance and the amount to get.' So there's like, they could get that done in 45 days, not 45 years."
"Yeah. We even talked earlier when we weren't recording about your family constitution. And I find that the family constitution in itself, there's a lot of magic to that. Can you, you just talk about what is a family constitution and how you would go about making a family constitution for yourself?"
"So a trust is filled with legal ease and you've read them. I've read them. There's nothing inspiring about reading a basic trust. It's just the set of instructions that avoids the courts and has some basic information. It can help with taxation. It can help with that kind of stuff. But the problem with it is if you hand it to the next generation, they don't really know what they're reading. It's just like, 'Okay, this is, I have a, you know, fiduciary and a trustee and this is what's supposed to happen.' And most of the time it's not well thought out. It's like, 'Hey, when you turn 30, here's a bunch of cash. When you turn 35, here's some more cash. And when you're 40, here's the final installment.' Well, when did you stop making financial mistakes? Because I haven't. So, if someone just handed me more money than I'd ever had before that I didn't earn, the chance of me actually doing well with that is limited. We don't know what's going on with that person's life from an addiction standpoint, from a divorce standpoint, from a, a number of things. And to not have that be, 'Hey, let's create like a family bank so that you could have incentives and even potentially borrow from it, but with responsibility instead of recklessness.' So the family constitution says, 'How do you want this to go? How, like, what's important to you? What are your values? What, what do you stand for as a family? What's your family motto? What's, what's, um, what's the philosophies that have served you? What are the mistakes that you want other generations to learn from and not have to make another time?' And inside of that is where you can start to spell out how you want things to go from an incentive standpoint. What you're willing to fund, not fund. What you're willing to help with, not help with. So, it's, it's essentially this instruction manual with a pulse that comes from a place of your own words, your own ideas, not just an attorney."
"You're a writer, you're a bestselling author, you've written more books than most people have read."
"How if you're not that, how do you go about writing something like this? I know you're working on something to make it easier, but like, if you were to, even without your, like, how does someone actually go about that? Because I find that it sounds really good out of your mouth, but people almost get paralyzed and don't start."
"Yeah. I partnered with an attorney who created an entire process to help establish values through a software. So people go through it, they answer, and it helps bring that out in them because with a blank page, it's intimidating, you know? But that actually has a, a questioning process that helps unveil it. Then we use AI and I've created these like constitution GPTs that then have the framework that they can fill in the blanks from that value set. And so even on a rudimentary level, they can go to rockefellermethod.com/live and build a family crest and build their family constitution in a very basic fashion for free. They can just go and they, and the AI will help with it. It's not perfect, but it's progress and it gets them started. And so, yeah, when someone sits down with me, you've referred people to me that will spend a whole day with me and we can build it all out in a day because I just get to know them, ask them questions, and then I'm able to take what's most important to them and put it into words and they 100% of the time cry because it's like, they, there's so much depth and intimacy to that. Like, this is it. And now it lives in their life, not just on a wall. A lot of mission statements, even the mission statement I put together with my family when my kids were seven and nine, they didn't understand a lot of it. It's kind of, it was wordy. It was like we had to kind of reinforce it all the time. So, what I learned was if we could just figure out what our values were, which are just one-word things, right? Like integrity and love. We end up making mantras that are memorable. We have each other's back. We hug and kiss to greet and say goodbye. We finish what we start. And, and those mantras now that they're 18 and 20, they've used them. They've said them. They've lived by them because it's more memorable. But, you know, we, we've created resources and tools to make that happen. I mean, when I sit down and do a constitution with someone, it takes me only about an hour and a half on day two. Day one, I'm just hanging out with them. We're walking the river. You've been up there. We're, we're sitting down and having a meal and I'm just getting to know them and I just share very openly about my life and vulnerably so that they feel really welcome to do it. And then when I get to the questioning part and building it out, then they have an infrastructure and framework that guides the trustees and that their kids would want to read or their grandkids would want to read or great-grandkids because it's words from the person that started this as an act of love."
"Love it. Okay. Tell me the exact steps that an average person or an average person with means, but is not a billionaire, on how they can set up a Rockefeller-style dynasty for their family and, and if you can, step one through however, and we'll just break it down."
"Okay. So the first thing is to establish a trust. And for the most, most of the people in the world, that's just a revocable living trust, right? Depending on the state, it might be a little bit different where you might have one trust or two trusts. It just kind of depends on the rules of that state. And it's a transparent document. You can put stuff in, you could take it out, you could put, you know, you could deed your cars to it, could deed your home to it, you could name your bank..."
"There's really no tax benefits, but you're organizing everything and you're making sure that the court in whatever state you, you die in doesn't determine where things go. You're, you're creating a document that says, 'This is what I want to happen.'"
"And wealthy people that don't do this. Like Prince didn't have a trust. James Gandalfini, the actor, didn't have a trust. Uh, Howard Hughes didn't have a trust. That was a 20-year debacle because he didn't have direct heirs. He had cousins. And a lot of the money gets, you know, just spent on courts and through that whole process to eventually end up in their hands at a, at a depressed rate. It's not, you know, I even had someone in Europe that they basically paid a 70% tax rate on their inheritance because his dad had a business in France, but they lived in Belgium. And, and by the time it got to him, 70% of it was gone because of lack of planning. And, and so if we look, we can see how much Prince was worth. We can see how much James got because it becomes 100% public knowledge if it's not in a trust. In a trust, it remains private. And I think we're in a world where privacy is already pretty difficult. The last thing you want to do is just air out everything that's there because now people could go after those heirs for, you know, frivolous stuff or saying, or they just know that it's theirs. So it, it keeps that private and it, when you die, it protects it. Well, you're alive, it doesn't, there's no asset protection."
"When you die, it becomes irrevocable. Meaning it becomes irrevocable. Becomes like now..."
"It's no longer, it's no longer yours. It's the trust."
"The trust now owns those assets, not the kids."
"So if they're in trouble, it's protected. And, and you have the H.E.M.S., right? Health, education, maintenance, and support provision. So you can say, 'Hey, this is the amount that I would want them to have each year up to this amount.' Or you can say, 'Hey, we don't just want this money to go out. We want this money to operate as a bank that can finance and fund family things including family retreats or including weddings or, you know, uh, entrepreneurial pursuits that could be a portion of that.' Like that's the stuff I kind of go through with clients. But, and, and we have the legacy builder toolkit that if they buy the book, they could just download the toolkit and walk through those steps. So they're paying $7.50 and they have full access to this."
"Then the second thing is insurance."
"Okay. So step number one is get a living revocable trust. And then within that..."
"Because it can be even overwhelming to say like, how do I decide when to give kids money and all? Does that come in future steps?"
"Yes. That's going to be basically inside of the trust in two ways. You have like, depending on your level of wealth, you might just have a trustee or you might have multiple trustees. And the reason you might have multiple trustees inside of the trust because a trust has the trustee, it has the grantor, often the same person, the grantor and the trustee, and then it has the beneficiaries, right? And so the beneficiary of an insurance policy can be the trust. And now the trust can spell out what to happen when those proceeds come in. And, and if you have a perpetual trust, meaning you're in a state where those trusts can last forever, like South Dakota, versus some that are limited and that the trust eventually dissolves, that's an important thing. Now, I know that we're starting to get into a lot of steps here, but it's really just the basics of you set up a trust and then you get insurance. So, now insurance..."
"Is first, it depends on the person's circumstance. Some people might be really struggling right now. They don't have the cash flow. So just getting term insurance and asking for the maximum amount a company will offer you because they will not over-insure. They don't want to create an incentive for someone to disappear or die. So they're going to say, 'How much income do you have and how many working years do you have?' And there's a bit of an equation. Or if you're retired, they might say, 'How much are your assets worth? We'll give you enough to cover those assets.' So I call that economic value replacement. Solomon Hubner, who wrote 'Economics of Life Insurance,' calls it human life value. And a lot of people go, 'Oh, this $5 million policy, that's so much money.' I'm like, 'For someone that could qualify for that, that's like saying, if you could never earn another dollar the rest of your life, is $5 million a lot?' For someone who can only qualify for a million, it might sound like a lot of money to someone who's not a millionaire. But if you're like, 'If you could never earn another dollar for the rest of your life, is a million?' Because it's not about the lump sum. It's about the replacement of income. So, how much money would it take to replace that income knowing taxes could change, interest rates can fluctuate, and inflation can start to rob the purchasing power. So, you want to get as much as possible. And in term insurance with a mutual insurance company, it could be converted to whole life regardless of your health. And so, you've locked in that insurability if that's all that you can afford. But some people like, 'Well, term's cheap. I'm just going to stay with term.' If you had a term policy and you live to life expectancy, your premiums will be greater than the death benefit because after 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years, if it's a level or if it's annual renewable, it jumps up in price when you have a likelihood of dying because the insurance company no longer has control. Like they know within a very close percentage how many people that buy a policy are going to die based upon the underwriting. And they're not insuring people who are dying. They're insuring people who are healthy, right? So essentially, you get the death benefit first and then secondarily you go, 'All right, how can I design this to be around a day longer than me?' Because only 1.1% of term insurance ever pays out. But if you have a permanent policy, I like only one type of permanent plan, which is whole life. Now, whole life on paper will illustrate lower than the other types of policies out there because you have higher guarantees. And when people can pull levers because they can change the cost of insurance, they can change the performance. Like there's a lot of moving pieces, you go, 'Oh, this is great.' But if you look like index universal life, the most popular insurance sold out there besides term has four times more documentation than whole life because there's that much more complexity of moving pieces. And if someone goes, 'Well, this one says a million of cash in the future. This one says 700,000. I want the million.' But what they're not realizing is that million has a lot of strings attached and a lot of levers that can be pulled and the chances of it actually getting to that number are very small. So they take risk on something that is risk-free. Meaning we are all going to die if we, even if we can upload our consciousness to a computer because of AI sometime in the future. Insurance companies consider you dead at 100 or 120 years old depending on which policy you have called the living death where the money comes in. So you can actually say, 'Oh, that's going to come in.' So I can spend more money in my life knowing it's going to be replenished and not destroy my legacy. So whole life because guaranteed minimum cash value. Once a dividend is paid, even though it's not guaranteed to be paid, it becomes guaranteed. I would only work with a company that's always paid a dividend for over 100 years or 150 years where they handled the Civil War, they handled a Great Recession, a Great Depression, uh, World War I and II, all of those kind of things. So that you have that level of certainty because what we're looking for is knowing that that's going to come in no matter what versus it comes in if a bunch of conditions are met. It's not an investment, it's an asset allocation choice to say this is where I put my fixed income. Fixed income is like money markets, it's cash, it's bonds, it's those things that have a fixed, so this is what you get when you put it in. Where stocks, it's not fixed, it's up and down. So, there's a lot of people that could invest in their business and do much better than they could in cash value, but that stability has value and that death benefit has value because now they've secured their legacy by having death benefit. I mean, the Rockefellers, they can make a lot of money. They've done very well in oil, you might say, right? But they still chose to do this, which had a lower projected return than their own business because they know they don't control when someone dies in their family. They don't control the economic conditions. They don't control what the taxation is at the time. They don't control what interest rates are. They don't know what inflation's going to be. So, this helps them replenish anytime they have this economic loss because every Rockefeller that's born, the family goes, 'That's an asset. We're going to invest in that person. We're going to help them grow. We're going to help them be part of this entire empire. And when they die, that's an economic loss to us. We want to replenish that. So, if there's a mistake or if there's a high tax issue, we're not going to lose everything because the Vanderbilts didn't use trusts. And what happened is it got siphoned off from tax. It got siphoned off from spending. There were no rules, so they could just buy a mansion. They could throw huge parties. The Vanderbilt parties look like they were pretty epic. Like kind of the Great Gatsby type of stuff, high roller parties. And so eventually there were Vanderbilts, they're like, 'Okay, we own the Biltmore and there's 125,000 acres.' And when they're dying, they're like, 'Wait, we just had to donate a bunch of this land to offset the death tax, right?' And so now they start going from 125,000 down to 8,000 acres. They're running a 2% profit margin on their entire property. And so if they didn't have trusts, they could completely lose everything, which they lost most of it because the 10 mansions they own in Manhattan, they own none of those anymore. They don't own the Breakers in Rhode Island. They just own the Biltmore, which has gone from 125 to 8,000. That's a pretty large decline because trusts and insurance, where the insurance could have been like, 'Great, we can pay the tax or we can keep the insurance with the proper trust outside of the estate, pass even more money on.' And for those people that get really upset about that, because like, 'Oh, you're not paying tax.' I'm like, 'They paid tax on the earning. They don't have to pay, you know, if you inherit money, they want it to be taxed again. It's already been taxed, right?' So, so that's insurance and trust. Insurance and trust."
"Okay. So do you recommend that the life insurance death benefit gets paid to the trust and then in then the trust you document how you want that paid out? So instead of having it go to your heirs immediately, you have it go to the trust and then the trust very much lays out how this money can be spent."
"And the way it works in a family constitution is it creates a framework that's a..."
"Family constitution, step number three? Or is step number one?"
"It's, it's really kind of step three."
"Okay. So step one is the living trust. Step two is getting life insurance, whether it's term or whole life, and the death benefit get paid to the to the trust."
"To the trust."
"For a family constitution to happen, it's kind of family retreat first, family constitution second. Because in the family retreat, you start to, you know, have everybody participate, what's important to them, what lessons you want to pass down, what does the family stand for? You know, like everything from mottos and mantras to values and, and just kind of these guardrails that say, 'Hey, we don't want anything to like, in mine, I'm like, I don't want to invest in public markets when I die. I want to invest in my heirs. I want to help them grow knowledge, grow business, you know, grow skills, and otherwise, I just want it very safe and stable. We don't need to take risk with it.' Because you might have one person in a family that's really brilliant at growing money and allocating capital like a Warren Buffett, but that doesn't mean the heirs know how to do what he did, right? Different skill set. So, I want that stability. And if someone were to be a trustee and not follow my family constitution, I have what's called a trust protector. A trust protector is a fiduciary. It is an attorney that can veto where they're allocating money because it doesn't follow the family constitution guidelines."
"And is that established at the trust level or constitution level? So the constitution becomes the preamble to the trust and it's more of like, to me, my family constitution isn't like this definitive document that doesn't have a way to evolve because I don't know what the world's going to be like in 50 years, 100 years. It's going to be radically different. So I just want the timeless principles and I want the overall philosophy and I just want some guidelines that the, you know, the, the trustees can follow and the kids can benefit from and grandkids. But then the trust protector can just say, 'Hey, that kind of investment, that's not something that's here because it could put the capital at risk.'"
"So, can I, can I do a 1.0 and 2.0 and you correct me. 1.0 is getting a basic living revocable trust, getting term insurance to protect your human life value, and then building some type of family values. If someone has that, they're better off than most people walking right now. And so, and that's not hard to do. Not hard to do. Okay. The 2.0, you know, is living revocable trust or an irrevocable trust if you're wealthy enough and, and doing the work."
"And as, as we say this, the state tax kicks in just above 15 million. And, you know, there's provisions that you can make sure that you could pass on 30 million if you're married because each person can pass on 15 million. Um, but at that point, you have assets to protect. So 'own nothing, control everything' means you have an irrevocable trust with a distribution trustee that can allow you to utilize the cash while you're alive without having to be included in the estate when you die."
"Yes. And, and really in the 2.0, it, you do got to spend time figuring out who's going to be those trustees because that also, that can be a lot. Like even when we're going through it, it's, it's emotional to be like, 'Okay, my wife and I are not going to be here. Who, how is this going to play out?' It's, it's work. But is it, it's establishing that, still getting your human life value, but in this case, getting a lot of whole life could be a part of 2.0, utilizing like you are going to utilize your cash value to benefit your kids while you're alive. So this is not just a, 'when Garrett and Carrie are dead,' this is a, 'while we're a family, we're going to be able to live this out.' And then instead of just writing your values, you're taking it a step further. And step number three is you're building a family constitution. Is that, talk to me on like, is the 1.0 versus 2.0? Is there a 3.0? Is there, is there a next level to that? Or if you really get, if you get your, your trust set up, you get your human life value and your, and your, and you're utilizing life insurance and you're building a family constitution, that's really the three steps."
"Yeah. So the, the full thing is really five pieces. The core of the Rockefeller method is insurance and trust. That's piece one and two, or trust and insurance. Then we talked about the next thing, which is a family retreat, which is how you start meeting with your heirs, getting in the conversations, investing in them, helping them grow their skills. The family constitution, which is capturing the essence of who you are and saying why this exists in the first place with a set of instructions and preferences that help it to maintain and grow. And then a family office. Now, family office is out of reach for most people. The Rockefellers were so wealthy that they had a family office, meaning they had a team of financial people that only worked for their family. Attorneys, accountants, investment people only worked for their family and no one else. And they spent a huge amount of money on the tax strategy to avoid a lot of the taxes with that kind of a team because when you're at that level of wealth, a tax attorney can help you do things with collectibles and stuff that's like very custom, right? So eventually there became multiple family offices, meaning MFOs, they don't just work with one family. They work with 50 or 100 families, but they're still pretty expensive because if you're not worth at least 10 million or have 10 million investable, you're not going to get access to it because the ones I know start at $9,000 a month, they're $18,000 a month, or even they have one client I know at $50,000 a month. Now, that person's worth a billion dollars. So, they're still in a pretty good situation what they're paying versus other places. Um, so the reality is MFOs are out of reach as well. So, there's virtual family offices. Now, virtual family offices, I've tried to build these in the past and not success. I mean, mediocre success, meaning I had clients, but there was still slippage because it's not really about budgeting to get wealthy. Budgeting is what happens when people get in a saver's mindset and think, 'If I could just spend less and save more, I'll have something for the future.' That's not how the wealthy think. The wealthy go, 'I need a command center that everything's working cohesively so I can grow my wealth.' Now, they're not spending more than they make, but they're not also going, 'I have $50 for gifts this month and I've got, you know, that's not what gets them wealthy. I'm going to cut out my coffee.' That's not what gets them wealthy. It's that they now know how to deploy capital. So, a family office is cohesive, comprehensive, and coordinated. And so, a virtual family office, why it was hard for me is I tried to have a mortgage firm and a PNC for car and home insurance. And the problem is it was too boutique. And I couldn't always get the best deal for people. So I'd have to refer it out, refer to an attorney, refer. And now that there's slippage, there's leakage. There's there's separate conversations. There's people that might not agree with each other. And here's the thing. If people are going to save tax, it doesn't come from being like, 'Oh, I have a home office and I can write off through a GUSTAL.' Those are the basics. If you save tax, it's which corporation do you choose? How do you pay yourself in that corporation? And how do you do the buy, borrow, die strategy, which is another Rockefeller method type of strategy. If you're a business owner and you grow your business, if you could get loans from the business instead of having to liquidate stock or have to give up ownership and equity, you don't pay tax on a loan. And then you can spend that money, but when you die, the death benefit could pay that loan off, which would be tax-free with the death benefit, tax-free with the loan, instead of a 40% hit right from the beginning. Huge advantage, which means you don't have to try to double your return taking a bunch of risk because if you save 40%, that's a huge return just from tax strategy. So family office, family retreat, family constitution with insurance and trust on the inside, that is kind of the comprehensive like 3.0 or whatever it is. And if you're wealthy, you're talking now dynasty trusts and asset protection trusts. So there is a level of, uh, complexity there that really requires an attorney that's truly dialed in. And that family office concept is also important because over 90% of people when they die, their kids use a different financial person because they weren't part of the meetings."
"They weren't part of the conversation. So now they're going to an entirely new person that doesn't understand the family's values or their intentions and they're trying to deploy that capital without an investment DNA philosophy, without a, like, who are they and what are they trying to accomplish? They're just going like, 'Oh, let's take risk and try to earn more money.' And so think about that 90 plus percent. But you have companies like Bessemer Trust, which I wrote about what the Rockefellers do. So, you know, Bessemer Trust came about because there was, you know, there was this letter that Henry Phipps wrote to his kids, which is like a letter of wishes and like a very short family constitution saying, 'Hey, I'm giving you this, but I hope you are going to grow it and there's this trust company that we're going to work with.' And Bessemer Trust keeps the majority of their clients."
Because it's ultra high net worth, the kids are involved in the decision-making. It's a family office where most people are fragmented. They have an accountant that doesn't communicate with the attorney. They have an insurance person that disagrees with the investment guy, and everybody's fighting for transactions instead of transformation. That transformation happens when there's depth of conversation around values and understanding who the family is and what they're trying to accomplish, and then designing the plan around that instead of being sold a plan that might not actually get them what they want.
>> Yeah. Oh, Garrett, I love interviewing you because you just tee you up and let you do the rest. Um, family retreat. Let's double-click on that. That's really interesting. I I want to do a family retreat with my family. How, how do you actually? What makes a great family retreat?
>> Most people overcomplicate a family retreat.
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>> And we're in complicated times where you have blended families and you have people that go, "Oh, my kids are already in their 20s and 30s." I remember this guy, Jim. He decided to go through a two and a half day uh family retreat workshop with us. It was an intimate setting. There was only a few clients there. I had Rich Christensen running it with me, who's brilliant at this and has written books on it. And Jim, at 70 years old, when now his kids are, you know, 30s and 40s in the room, they actually saw that his business was stalled out because he was taking on too much on his own. His wife was now having to clean up the mess, which meant she could they be time as a grandma, and it was creating a lot of stress and strain on the family. It was impacting his health, everything. So the kids actually had, one of them was really brilliant and had married someone that knew a lot about, you know, growing a business. So they actually got involved. The business went from 1 million to 10 million in revenue in three years, and his wife actually got to retire and be a grandma. Now, that came from a family retreat, even though they were older. I started family retreat when my kids were seven and nine. Hard. They're just hurting cats. They're not. It was enough that they got to circle the values. We got to talk about it. They felt like they participated. But just, you know, a few weeks ago, we sat down as a family at my cabin around the table. We had a full day, and we talked about everything, and all of the values were still the values. All the models were still the mottos. And we could talk about times that impacted us in our life and what it meant and go through what the family constitution was. I read the family constitution. I was emotional.
>> Do you adjust? Do you adjust the family constitution at at all?
>> You did because the first version I didn't know how to create. I had gone through this amazing program called Life Book. Uh, you know, I'm a trustee for for John and Missy Butcher that created the program. It has 12 categories of life that you go through, and you say, what's your premise in this category? What's your vision? What's your, you know, purpose, and what's your strategy? And I kind of took that and tried to consolidate it. But it wasn't really a constitution as much. It was like, here's who we are as a family. Here's our values. But it didn't have enough instruction in it. It was just like, here's ideas.
>> So 52 pages is a lot. I got it down to 38 pages. Felt really good about it. Now it's at nine pages because the nine pages are
>> like really succinct and clear. It's kind of that notion. Sorry for the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. I finally, and then it just has the frameworks of what we do for education, education in the classroom, out of the classroom, entrepreneurial pursuits, you know, career, like all of that. And it's kind of like this love letter with instruction. And it's, it doesn't say you have to do anything. It says, if you want to do these things, here's how we can support, and we'd be happy to support, but we're not going to just support you not to do anything.
>> So, so a retreat at its basic form is getting together as a family, going over your values or constitution, and having conversations. Is that is
>> and keep it really easy. Like I've had family retreats, uh, in 2019. I had a family retreat with my mom, my dad, and my two sisters. And what we decided to do was take a trip. I want to go back to where my great-grandfather was from. But ironically, we got there and it was too snowy. We couldn't get to the overpass, so we just went to another place in Italy and had a great time where we had conversations. We just had 3x5 cards, and we just went through the cards and had deep, meaningful conversations that would have been hard to have in regular life, right? Very helpful. Um, you don't have to make it that elaborate. The, what we do in our family is we create traditions because if you want sustainable wealth, the family retreat has to have three things, and this is every religion has this, and every long-term organization has this: rituals. So think in a business, it's huddles and meetings are like the rituals. So what are the rituals you can have in your family? My wife's ritual when the kids were young was at night, ask them, what was your high today? What was your low? And what did you learn from each? My ritual was driving them to school and saying, what are you grateful for? What would make it a great day? And what are the mantras you want to reinforce? So those are rituals. They, they reinforce on a daily basis. Traditions, less frequent, a little bit more time when you're there. Traditions is where we actually do the family retreat, which is, let's find something really fun. Summer Olympics, let's come up with a bunch of fun games to play, and at the end of the day, let's answer three 3x5 cards for each other. Um, something fun, something from our past, like that we want to learn about with from family and where we came from, and something in the present that we want to learn. So, those are the three questions. We go around the table while we're eating, while we're hanging out. Really easy. It, it's not overwhelming. We had a good time before, and we did that afterwards. Now, that's with extended family. Now, when it's us, we have it where we just go up. We like this year, we were supposed to go to Austin. My son was a little too stressed 'cause of school. So we end up just canceling the trip to Austin, left the airport, went up to the cabin. We did a little project at the cabin. Had to get some, you know, leaves out of the gutters and, you know, sweep up a couple things. So we did a little like work. Then we watched The Office and just laughed and had fun, the four of us. And then the next day, we rolled up our sleeves and we went through family values, family constitution, what they're up to in life, what they could use the most support with, how we're all doing. We have a, you know, all this kind of agenda we went through. We got through about two-thirds of the agenda 'cause at a certain point, the kids were tapped out. It was like, cool, we'll do that next quarter. But just keep it light and simple. And then just have a short burst where you can really go deep.
>> Yeah. And and again,
>> and by the way, symbol is the third one. Ritual, tradition, and symbol.
>> So, symbol, symbol, symbols like family crest, like, you know, you got your logo for Better Wealth there.
>> Um, so you, you create a symbol for the family, and that family crest, I mean, with AI,
>> we, we can create a family crest in moments. You just, you know, what kind of colors, what kind of symbols, what's important to you, take the values from the family constitution and put it in there. And then you just sit there and play with it until you're like, oo, I want this a little darker here. I want this. And I've taken tons of people through that. And it's very meaningful because it's not just the crest. My favorite part of the crest is the description of the crest.
>> So our family crest is on a cooler. Our family crest is on cornhole. All right. We have an actual medieval, you know, symbol that goes above the, you've seen it, I think, above the mantle. So whatever works for you. I've had clients that put on a hat, on a t-shirt, just to reinforce.
>> Yeah, it's a family logo. And so the description of the logo is what's most meaningful. But then the logo reminds you of the description. My kids can tell you what it means, how we created it, and it, you know, we kept all of those values. Here we are, you know, 11 years later, and we're like, "Yep, those are the mantras. Yep, that's what we stand for." But I was able to make it more succinct and clear. Progress over perfection. Done is better than perfect. You know, get as many people there as you can in the family, and then, you know, work on it. I, I, I was parented well. Every time I would leave as a teenager, my parents would remind me to say, "Hey, you represent the Williams." And yet that was like 1.0. I think the 2.0 would have been like, how we didn't have any logo. We didn't necessarily have any family constitution growing up. There's some of that extra intentionality that creates rocket fuel into clarity. It's like we have a clarity crisis on our hands. A lot of young people have no idea what they, a lot of older people have no idea what what they're really doing. And what you're doing is you're creating purpose and clarity. And I, I'm really grateful for you actually taking the time to break this down because there's sound bites of you saying a lot of this stuff. I've never sat down with you and gotten the whole like process. And this was very helpful for me. And it's convicting because we have family vacation on both sides of my family. And yet at this time of this recording, we're not necessarily being intentional about taking some time away and going that extra mile. And I'm now thinking, like, my takeaway from this conversation is, what do we do it for our immediate family? Because we have done our family values. We have what Williams stand for, our values, and all. And my daughter's a year and a half, so I'm sure it's going to evolve and all, but we've not done a family constitution yet. And on both s on both sides, we, we meet with our family, which I'm grateful for, but what's that extra step? Now, my family growing up had what they call a special dinner. And special dinner would be like where we would all get together, we would bless my mom, we would highlight a sibling. So there were versions of that that, and that's what I'm saying, like my parents did. Um, and so it's like, it's just, I'm talking out loud and figuring out like, what, what's that next step? But it, I, I am a product of how that's impacted my life, and I want to be able to do that two or three acts for my family.
>> Yeah. We, we reinforce this with family meetings, and we weren't always consistent with them, but we tried to have a family meeting once a week.
>> Wow. And um, now we, you know, we try to just do like a Sunday brunch. Um, I mean, my wife kind of feels like, oh, we failed. We just don't have enough dinners together. It's just hard to get, it's just, you know, so I don't want anyone to listen to me like, oh, it's, it, how do you do all that? Well, we created technology rules that we, I would give us a D minus trying to, you know, implement that. My wife and I were talking about this on our date the other night. We're like, we worked so hard. We got rid of video games for a while, and we'd play like Uno when they were little, and it just was like so much effort and like, hey, you can't be on games when family's over, and they would still sneak away, or no more than three hours on a weekend, and it was like, you know, it's like it just, it was really difficult to implement. And I, we didn't always have our family meetings, but one of the things we did do is with my old firm, I, I realized people say, oh man, I just, I feel like so behind, and how did you do all this? And I'm jealous that you that you figured this out, and I, is it too late for me? I'm like, "All right, I'm going to show you guys a family meeting." So we actually broadcasted one of our family meetings.
>> Wow.
>> And it, it went perfect because first off, we had like a contractor at the house. So my wife's late to it. There's hundreds of people watching. My kids don't know how many people are watching. And it was like that, my youngest was like just starting to do comedy.
>> That's gutsy that you're that you
>> and we're, we're busting each other's balls, and we're joking around, and we're doing all this kind of stuff. And my wife comes in, and it was just, I think people saw it. It wasn't overly complicated, and it wasn't perfect. It was like, "Hey, how am I doing on a scale of 1 to 10 as a dad?" "Hey, how am I doing on a scale of 1 to 10?"
>> That's a gutsy question to ask lives.
>> And then I'm like, "Well, what could I do better?" And, you know, what's, what's something you're working on that we can support you with? What's one thing you'd like to accomplish this week? And we'll have a long agenda, and we might get through 10% of that agenda sometimes. And then eventually we'd be like, "Okay, the kids will get in the hot tub with us. Let's just do a quasi-informal family meeting. Let's just get one thing like figured out. Like, how are we going to get our oldest off video games and into the world? Like, let's just have that." And the youngest, it's time for him to quit his job and get into a sales job so he can learn new skills. Now, he just turned 18. And guess what? He got a job at Cutco, you know, left Trader Joe's. And the oldest like ended up enrolling in a program for school. It's mostly virtual. He goes to like Miami like once a year, um, for the four years. And so like we figured that out because we had that conversation. But again, we're still dealing with stuff as as parents, and, you know, still have our our, you know, things that we feel like we could have done better. But it's just start where you're at and just take the next step and don't overcomplicate it. Don't try to do too much. Find something the family can get behind, and then they're like, "Yeah, this is
>> Well, also it gives people an excuse to do that 'cause I think it can be really awkward to be like, "All right, guys. We're gonna spend time talking about." But blame Garrett. Blame myself. Watch this video and just say, "Hey guys, I we're gonna start doing this thing. It's going to be imperfect." But it gives me an excuse to to actually ask questions that maybe you've never asked your family or kids as a as a team.
>> The wildest thing is the first time we did one of these family retreats, four clients. We had, you know, 10 10 clients come. They, it was just, it was the husband and wife. It wasn't, there were no kids that came to this this first one. And then the later one, we had people bring their kids, and we had, you know, different activities because Rich brought his kids, which Rich has done such a good job. Rich Christensen, Toaster Turner, Purple, Legato, he's got these great resources for it. He's taught me so much around this concept, and his kids kind of ran stuff for the kids, right, that were younger kids, and the older kids stayed in the room. But the first one we did, there was a husband and wife that came, and a year afterwards, she got killed in a car accident, and then two years later, he got, he died. So like
>> they came to the second one, and they brought their son, and like, so their son had all of these resources that he wouldn't have otherwise had, all these deep conversations that wouldn't have otherwise happened, and these symbols that actually mean something to remember the family by. So it's like, one of these tragic events that at least they had this stuff that most people put off because he was young. He was like 12 at the time, you know, and to be able to have a situation where he, he'll have this stuff that's captured to remember his parents by in the future, I think is really instrumental.
>> All right. Any anything else that you want to say before we switch subjects a little bit?
>> So, I, I was wondering what your opinion, why is, what would the Rockefellers do so popular? I think 50% is just people in the financial industry buy it and give it to clients. That's like they just, they buy it in like 10 copies at a time, 100 copies at a time. But why do you think
>> it's exactly what you said about the contrast between the Rockefeller and the Vanderbilts. And we, we all, very few of us can even comprehend, I know I can't comprehend what a billion dollars or billions of dollars feels like. But there's that aspiration to want to be better. And it's, if I can, if I can for 20, 30 bucks, steal or borrow or utilize some of the principles that the ultra wealthy have done to keep money and pass it on, and I can apply it to my own life, I'm going to want that. And so it was just packaged in a way that was really intriguing. It wasn't really about products.
>> Um, that would probably be
>> the second version, especially. The first version
>> was a little heavy on the life insurance side and not enough on these family legacy rings of of office constitution and retreat. And so I like that we were able to update that, give more resources towards that because we give resources that people could just download and utilize. People, you and I have known, people that you've introduced to me
>> got those resources and completely built out their family constitution just from the resources in the book. And I was like blown away 'cause the questions are there. And and we, I loved it so much, and obviously you're a dear friend and brother that I'm, I'm partnered with you and wrote the forward. And if anyone wants wants that copy, we'll have a link down below for you to learn more about it. But I, no, I, it's, it's, it's a great brand. The cover's great. The content's good. Um, it's, it's, it's well done. It's well done. It doesn't, it doesn't shock anybody, including myself, that this is such a popular book, but I think that story in itself is like lightning in a bottle. It's just like it's really good. It resonates with people, and then the book delivers it. It's one thing to have a really good cover and a story, but then the book actually delivers on value.
>> What's wild to me is a lot of people have this very strong negative opinion about whole life.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, because you have people like Susie Orman and Dave Ramsey that I wrote a chapter on because in their context, everything is about reducing expenses. That's their road. Like, you save yourself rich in their mind, right? In what they're teaching because they're talking to some people that are going in the negative and they're trying to get them where they're at least break even and positive. And so they're, they're using different methodologies than what the wealthy aren't spending more than they make. So it's different idea. So like, hey, just get some term insurance 'cause it's cheap. Yes, it's cheap now because there's not benefit in the future for 98.9%. And so just understanding how it actually works instead of just having this dogmatic belief system, just looking at it as a pure expense, I think it's really helpful. And it's wild to me that
>> there's a 4.6 out of five star average rating on the book
>> with a product that is that polarizing. I know.
>> You know, that polarizing. I mean, 'cause you've seen people that like online that are just like, you know, life insurance is a scam is the number one thing that people will will type if they, if I talk about this on the negative side. And then there's other people that go,
>> I did this 10 years ago and it's changed everything. I mean, that's the thing is you hear everybody say, "Oh, don't do it." That have never done it. And then the people that do it go, you don't get people, "Oh, I did that and that was bad."
>> It's like, you just don't hear that. It's, you know, especially if they're meeting with someone that designs it properly, which the book really outlines.
>> Yeah. Garrett, I you have over 100,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel. I think the last I checked, it's almost 110,000 subscribers. I'm a little over 50,000. Um, hoping to follow in your footsteps. We're hoping to get 100,000 followers uh on on YouTube as well. What, uh, what trends have you seen right now? You have a, you have you're leaning into content. You're going to be creating more content. If you're not subscribed, you should for sure subscribe to Garrett. What, uh, what, uh, what are you starting to see? Any trends that you like that you dislike? Like, what are your thoughts right now in just 2026 and the environment that we're in?
>> The trend that I haven't followed personally because this is not in my DNA is if you look at especially on YouTube, by the way, YouTube is bigger than Netflix. It's bigger than HBO Max. It's bigger than Amazon Prime. It's the biggest viewed thing on the planet for TV.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. So, that's, that's pretty, it's an amazing search engine. Um, but there's a lot of uh regurgitation. Um, a title does well with one person, and then 10 other people use the same title and to get the algorithm. So that's, that's one trend that I don't love about it. But what I do love is you can start at zero. And if you have a high quality video, it's not about subscribers, it's about engagement. So check this out. I got this text because I had dinner with someone last night.
>> And uh, I thought this was pretty crazy 'cause you know, I'm, I'm studying some of the grades and had hired people. And he goes, he's like, so and so's Instagram page has a 81% engagement rate. Another person that I, I learned from has a .33% engagement rate. Another person that everyone knows has a 42% engagement rate. He goes, "And during the same period, I have a 3.92% engagement rate." So, I think that one thing is I decided on social media.
>> I, I villainized it forever because I didn't want you because I'd watched, you know, these programs and I just thought, I don't want to get addicted to this thing. I don't want to have it suck my life into it, and then I'm not doing like, I'm not present with my family. Like, I don't, the only reason I don't show more of my life on it is because when I'm having an epic time with my wife,
>> blessing you,
>> I don't think like, hey, let me take a video or let me take it, you know? So I had to have this kind of mindset shift. And the mindset shift was,
>> if I'm truly going to serve people, if the only way I serve people is if they buy something from me, then I'm not really living up to my full potential. Number two, I want to put this year, I'm going, what if this was my last year on the planet? What would I want to put out there for people to see? So the context was more about service and more about how I could create even more valuable content out there. And then number three is I don't have to go look at what people are eating or what, you know, I don't have to go be on social media. I could just put good content on there in a place that I thought was too much of a cesspool. That's why I always was like, no, there's too much negative. Well, I can add positive to that versus opt out of it.
>> And so,
>> um, what I've, I've learned a lot in just the last year because I decided to go all in.
>> And say, "Hey, it's not just what I know, it's who knows me." And if they don't know me, it doesn't matter what I know for them. It doesn't help their life out at all. And if it's the only way they're going to get that is through reading a book, far fewer people read books than actually watch videos. So, you know, one is it gets me some some credibility with my kids. They do like to see the videos that take off, and their friends know who I am, and all that kind of stuff. I also really enjoy this is an aspect I, I really enjoy.
>> My wife jokes because she goes, "If you go through an airport, someone's going to stop you." I don't even have that big of a following, but when I go through the airport, someone walked up to me and called me professor at security. This professor? I'm like, "Professor?" She's like, "Yeah, I watch all your stuff." I was like, "I'm not really a professor, but okay." Like, I guess I'm teaching. So, um, but it was just cool. I had another person, again, another employee of an airport driving one of the like, "Hey, are you Garrett?" I'm like, "Yeah." Just gave her one of my books. Like, it was just kind of cool to have these interactions. And I've been with my kids in the airport where someone comes like, "Hey, can I get a picture?" It's a cool moment that I get to meet someone that feels like they know me because they've been watching, and we have this instant connection. I en enjoy that because I'm not a, I'm not a celebrity.
>> What type of content do you see right now that you would like push back on or that you really like? Like, are you, I know you react to some things. Love like the, I, the negative hooks do really well.
>> Yeah, for sure.
>> And you know, early last year I kind of tried some, but it just doesn't feel right to me. And so I'm, I did a video last year on AI as well, which I'm like, it's not my brand. It's not what I want to do. And I had another video that did really well where I said, "Hey, I think that behind closed doors, there's probably like half of the government workers that if we got rid of, we wouldn't even fill it." And then then there's a huge outburst of negativity. So I'm not trying to condemn because there's so many good workers, and I'm just pointing out an issue versus giving a solution that creates a lot of like, I wouldn't call it rage bait, but there's a lot of like debate there that I'm going, I want my brand to be one that's I'm helping people gain perspective. I'm helping people take back control of their finances. I'm not here to say you should do this and not do that. I want to say, let's look at this like, if you buy term insurance, what's the benefit and what's, you know, the con? Index fund, what's the good thing about it? What's the negative thing? Instead of being like, my opinion is I don't like index funds, no one else should do it. That's just not helpful. I want to help people think. And so I've found on the videos I've been doing that more, we're actually getting more engagement. Now, there's one video that I wouldn't take back that did really well, and the, it's my favorite engagement video. It's I just said that Dave Ramsey is preaching false Christianity, taking the Bible out of context to promulgate something that's not real or true. And that it's dangerous for people to think if I just pay off my mortgage and have a retirement plan, life's going to be just fine. The problem is it's one-dimensional. No tax advantage, the mortgage is paid off, all tax deferred, they have to pay taxes on the way out, and they didn't learn how to create cash flow. I think it's a very incomplete picture. Not that they should get rid of a retirement plan, not that they shouldn't pay off their home, but they really have to look to like, how can they, and like people gave good comments that were against what I said that I was able to respond and have some nice engagement and give some philosophy. That's the kind of engagement I want, or just giving them value, and it's, you know, so the trend that I'm seeing is you could have someone that just has a good video take off that has nobody following them because it's just a good video. And so now they can engage with people. And what I, what I really been doing is making sure to do a lot of responding, like taking time to engage with people and see them as people, not as subscribers.
>> That's good. That's good. What's your hottest take in 2026? Life's actually getting much better, yet people are fixated on what's worse.
>> And that's a, and that's because people are vying for people's attention. I don't, I don't invest in the stock market. Not that I have a problem with any individual stocks, but because 40% of the S&P 500, I don't want to exist. I don't think it's healthy for my kids or the world that we live in because they're vying to sabotage people's lives by garnering attention
>> instead of a real life. So they're trying to get them to believe that online is real life, and it's disconnecting humanity because too many people are addicted to their phone and not in conversation. And I think it's part of the reason we feel divisive. But I think that 80% of Americans are in a lot of agreement on most things, and then 10% on each fringe make us think that we're all against each other because that's what the clickbait that that gets the most attention. And that's one trend I don't like. I don't like
>> the again, like I didn't love the video where I, you know, had said something about government workers during the shutdown because I sit there and think of like so many government workers that have improved our lives. Like I was, I was meeting with one of my clients. Uh, I, I had flown into an inerson podcast, and he was in the military for a long time, and he was telling me about how when he was in the Middle East in like a tin can in the water that is super tiny, just monitoring things that are going on for like, you know, four straight months. He says the water temperature is 90 degrees because outside is like 115 degrees, and to even shower in this little place that he was in, he'd have to have water hit the wall before it hit him, or it would burn him. And he doesn't even have his own bed. He has to split time. So when he's on watch, someone, and he's like, and it's just this most horrendous conditions, and he did it to help protect us.
>> And I'm like, that is heroic. And for me to be any dismissive about the government because my dad worked for MSHAW, which is an essential organization for mine safety. Think about how many coal miners died. My dad was on mine rescue to pull out dead bodies. Without mine res, without like the parameters they set, there'd be far more deaths. So yes, there might be people that got given a job that they're doing some type of work just because it inflated the numbers for voting, that there's more jobs. That just a, that was a poor take on my part. And I just, I, I'm disappointed that in a moment of like, not being clear about who I am, what my message is, which my message is, how do people not only have wealth, but live a wealthier life? How can they put quality of life at the forefront of what they do, and not just put off their entire life?
>> And how is it that they can start to create a legacy that lasts? I want to have a million lasting legacies that I helped influence before I die. And so that's the brand. That's what's important. And if someone's entire intention is my life will be better paying off my mortgage, I have no, I have no place to tell them that's not a good idea. What I can tell them is what's the best method to get there that will get you there most safely and that will help you so that you don't lock your money away and get into trouble and maybe get your house foreclosed on. It comes from an advocacy standpoint instead of a judgment standpoint. When I was young, I really feel like I thought I knew more than people, and I wanted to be in battle with the people that I thought I knew more than, and it was very debate-oriented versus being helpful to let's just explore and actually have a willingness to change my mind instead of defend that I knew too much. Like, 'cause I've changed my mind about things over time with new evidence, with considering different perspectives and angles, but I have the principles that I'm going to rely on and say, "Does that align with that principle or not?" And if I didn't see something clearly, then I want to be informed.
>> Yeah, Garrett, thank you so much for who you are, what you're doing, coming on the show for the third or fourth time, and uh, just grateful for you. And I, I've shared this in the past, but like, I looked up to you, man, and getting getting into the space and going to your workshop when I practically sneaked in and um, read your books, heard you speak for the first time when I was just getting in and had a goal of like, I want to be on stage one day communicating at a fraction of what Garrett can communicate. So, thank, thank you just for what you're doing. And um,
>> I got to thank you because, um,
>> you know, you've, you've gotten to know me really well. And so whatever maybe pedestal you put on early in my career, you get to see all the real things that I deal with and the things I go through and the emotions and the difficulties. But I remember I was in Canada, and you called me like, I'm doing an event and I want you to come speak. And I was like, in a few weeks, I don't know if I could do it. But I called my wife. I'm like, "Hey, what's going on this weekend?" She's like, "Well, I'm going to fly to LA because I'm taking your sons to, you know, our sons to um, this event." And I was like, "Interesting." I'm like, "Well, I guess I could go to Denver first and then meet you in LA for their the graduation of this, and we can have this experience." And I just remember getting up, and you, like the way you introduced me,
>> so many people have been reading my books that I, I wasn't in the, I wasn't really in the industry. I was just building my business. I wasn't like, "Hey, let me help financial people." And that like was a big insight for me. I'm like, wait, this is really like these people are following and learning and like they're very like generous. And I just gave you this like very heartfelt, like there wasn't a plan speech, right? But I think you liked that one more than almost anyone I had done.
>> Good. It's hard to stop.
>> And then all of a sudden, like things really started to go sideways with this licensing deal I had with the firm that I had sold. And I spoke at your event again, and like a bunch of people came and had me do a one-day consult, which was a really good bridge while I was going through that tumultuous time. And I was like, hey, let me pay you. Like, no, dude, like just, I just, thanks for coming to speak. And I was like, well, that's, that's really nice and awesome. And the way you always talk about me and position me is very generous. And, you know, and you're always uh, showing up with abundance. And so it's really, it's, it's really fun.
>> Thank you, brother. Try it.
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