Lessons on Living Life Your Way Garrett Gee #550

Foreign, a state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that your preference for coffee or tea may boil down. See what I did there? To a matter of taste genetics. That that's because people with a version of a gene that increases your sensitivity to the bitter flavor of caffeine tend to be coffee drinkers. Which is kind of weird because you think if you're more sensitive to bitter flavors, you wouldn't like. Turns out tea drinkers tend to be less sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine, but they have versions of genes that increase sensitivity to the bitterness of other chemicals. So we used to believe, and it's kind of funny because we build all sorts of systems and structures and beliefs on things that we used to believe that we were totally wrong about. And here we used to believe that people avoid eating bitter foods because bitterness is an indicator of poison. That's just not true. In the new study, they looked at the DNA variants of genes involved in that bitter taste. They looked at caffeine, quinine, which is the taste of tonic water, and something called prop, which is a synthetic chemical that isn't found in food or drink that also tastes bitter. And researchers in three different countries, Australia, us, England. So this is kind of a big study. It looked at DNA from 400,000 participants and added up each person's variance in the taste and created a genetic score. And they compared those to what people like to drink. If you had the highest genetic score for caffeine's bitterness, you were 20% more likely to be a heavy coffee drinker, and you probably drank four more cups a day. And that's remarkable because we were totally wrong on our assumptions about bitterness. What's interesting, too, is that bitterswhich have long been used, like Swedish bitters my wife would talk about as a child in Sweden, have been used for various health things. And you go to Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine, and bitter is an important flavor. It turns out some of those bitter things talk to your gut bacteria and are metabolized by your gut bacteria. Even some of the polyphenols have these strong flavors. So it's really interesting that we're finding more and more about how our genes, how our mitochondria, and how our taste receptors are all linked in this incredibly intricate dance that, frankly, we didn't know anything about 20 years ago. So we just made up stories and believed them and then did stuff based on that. If you like that kind of thinking you owe it to yourself to check out my new book, Game Changers. And I'd be grateful if you real quickly went over to your favorite online bookseller and searched for Dave Asper Game Changers and picked up a copy of the book. It officially comes out on December 5th of 2019 and you can pre order it right now. The reason you want to order this book is that it would take you one quarter of an entire year to listen to about 500 episodes of Bulletproof Radio. If you listened for eight hours a day, five days a week, if your full time job was listening, I'm assuming you don't have time to do that. And if you are one of the people who has listened to all 500 episodes, I want to give you a hug. But if you're not one of those and you wanted the distilled knowledge of all of that time, I boiled it down with help of a statistician and thousands of hours of additional research into one book you can read in four hours. So your ROI is 500 hours of your time or four hours. Buy the book Game Changers. It's going to tell you what noteworthy people do to make themselves noteworthy in order. You're not going to copy what one person did to be successful. You're going to learn what most people agree on and learn rules based that. There's 46 laws for high performers and it actually works. This is what I studied to help me be who I am today. Game Changer's Book now speaking of noteworthy people, people who do unusual things that are worth paying attention to, I I have a special guest for you today. His name is Garrett G. He's actually a second cousin to Ali G. Okay, not really. But Garrett G Is known as, or say is the founder of the Bucket List family. And three years ago, he and his wife Jessica sold nearly all their belongings and set off to travel the world with their two small children. And they planned this for a few months, or until they ran out of their $45,000 in garage sale money. And instead they turn into a family of traveling journalists visiting 70 countries and getting 1.5 million Instagram followers and 600,000 YouTube followers. But what Garrett wasn't able to tell you until very recently was that that 45k in garage sale money was what he could have paid as a tip. Because before he did this in secret, he sold his tech company to Snap for a very large amount of money. So he's traveled around the world on a budget with a family, teaching people how to do it when he had no actual financial need to do that. He could have traveled around in his own jet, as far as I can ascertain from what I've seen online. Garrett, welcome to Bulletproof Radio.

Thank you, Dave. Thank you for the very kind welcoming. It's crazy to be here and talking to you right now. I've listened to the show for a very long time, as have my family members, and so it's going to be a really crazy experience for them to see me and hear me on here.

I actually didn't know that you were a longtime listener, so I'm truly honored and thank you for that, especially for sharing it with your family.

I feel like I should probably admit two things to you. One, I will probably be the least qualified person that you've ever had on the show. At least I feel that way. So it's a great honor to be on the show. And. And as the least qualified or feeling that way, I have a big brother who turned me onto the podcast, and he's someone who I really admire, really look up to, and I just think he's the smartest person in the world. And so when I got the invite to be on your podcast, the first thing I did is I called him and I asked him to come on the show as me. He and I look very similar. He knows my story inside and out, and. And I told her. I was like, I don't know if I can do it. I think you should go on. For me, if he would have accepted the offer, I was down for it. I was going to have him come on as me, but he turned me down.

That would have been the worst prank ever. I can't believe that.

I don't think you would have noticed, other than I would have sounded a lot smarter than I really am.

Well, you're kind of playing it cool. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is that you have displayed an amazing level of humility. And I know a good number of people who've made shocking amounts of money in their lives. And I know because even when I first started Bulletproof, they would call me and be like, you're one of these guys who knows about how to hack the human body and how to raise iq and I have all the money in the world, so would you be willing to come and spend a day with me and I'll write you a check? I'm like, okay, I'd love to do that. I can help to fund the baby Bulletproof that way. And a great number of These people are actually very motivated to help the world. So they're doing charitable endeavors, they're funding prizes, or they're feeding orphans and actually doing valuable good work. But they sort of. It's a path that a lot of people go down. You did a very radically different thing where you tightened up the purse strings, if anything, and you're like, I'm just going to sell everything, have a garage sale. We're just going to go like, what the hell was going through your mind? Like, you just had the biggest win. You're a young guy. Why didn't you buy a Lamborghini?

I think a lot of it came from fear, and at least in my mind, in a good way, a good type of fear, if that's even possible. But I have just seen in my life, money change a lot of people. It can obviously do a lot of good, but, man, too many stories of people coming upon money and it changing them for the worse. And I didn't want that to happen to me or my family or my marriage, especially my relationship with my family and friends. And so my wife and I, we. We talked about it very seriously and we agreed together, let's at least just wait. We don't know the answers. We don't know what's right and wrong. And until we feel more confidence in what might be right and wrong, let's just put a pause and put a basically hold on how we react to this money. Act as if it doesn't exist. And especially for, like, the entrepreneur inside me, I decided, you know what, I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs kind of become a bit more comfortable or lazy, and those are just death words to me. And so that was the plan. Let's act as if it doesn't exist. We won't touch it, except for charitable and service opportunities, and we'll just start over, start from zero. That means a new venture for me. You know, start building up a new bank account, build up a new savings, and just stay young and keep hustling.

You started. The company you started called Scan, was turned down on Shark Tank, but it ended up becoming a technology that Snapchat used for Snapcodes. It was a meaningful thing. You started this as a freshman at byu, Correct. And so, I mean, by the time you were basically done with byu, pretty much looks like based on the timing here, it was well on its way. You already raised $10 million and you ended up selling it when you were still probably under 30, I'm guessing.

Right, Right. So it was an interesting timeline because I stayed in school the entire time while building the company, even though we started at my freshman year. The next year we raised $1.7 million from Google Ventures and a few others. The year after that, we raised $7 million. And then it was the year after that, our third year, when I sold it to Snapchat or Snapchat for the 54 million. But that entire time, I stayed in school. Not necessarily to, like, be in school, but during all of that, I was playing on the soccer team.

I was.

Which was a passion for me during that time. And, yeah, so there's this weird, almost like double life balance of going to soccer practice and then rushing to the office and running a startup and then going back to soccer and, you know, and that was my life for. For three years.

So when you had your big exit, did you have a giant party to celebrate with all your friends? Like, did everyone know or were you just super?

See, that was the messed up thing is everybody knew I was working hard on my iPhone app. But when the exit happened, it was 100% confidential at the time, like, legally confidential, that I couldn't tell anyone except for my wife. My own parents didn't know, my siblings didn't know, my teammates on this soccer team, nobody knew. And legally, I couldn't tell them. And I adhered to that rule and I didn't tell anyone. And so people. I remember going to the first soccer practice after that happened, and I'm up in the training room getting my ankle taped, and I'm just looking around like, nobody even knows, and I can't tell anyone. And I'm just going to be regular old Garrett G. To everyone. So at first, like, you know, as an entrepreneur, some people kind of like have that dream of the big announcement or the big acquisition and the announcement on the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and TechCrunch, your name up and lights. Like, I drank a little bit of that Kool Aid in the early days and, like, imagine that day someday coming for me. But the cool thing was when it happened and it was all completely confidential, I actually ended up liking the privacy that nobody treated me different. I was still just regular old me, and I like that.

I have one other example of that that I know of. My friend Andrew, and I think he probably doesn't want me to use his last name, but he sold his Internet marketing company for $100 billion or something and. And went back to, I think it was film school and lived in the dorms, ate ramen, never told anyone anything about it. And at the end for graduation. He's like, hey, guys, why don't we go to Vegas? And we can't afford it. He goes, no, I'm chartering a jet. And like, what? Like, oh, my God. So. But for him, it was a similar story where he just wanted to be a normal guy instead of everyone looking at him kind of weird and wondering if they wanted something at all. So you said, all right, I'm not allowed to tell anyone. Did that mess with your head? I mean, did you have these things where, like, I really. I want to tell everybody. I can't. Did that stress you out?

Um, not so much. Like, like I said, luckily, I think it was such a crazy busy time for me that I almost didn't have time to worry about it or stress too much. But at the same time, I just learned that it was kind of a nice thing that everyone was.