Lessons on Living Life Your Way: Garrett Gee : 550

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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's because people with a version of a gene that increases your sensitivity to the bitter flavor of caffeine tend to be coffee, coffee drinkers, uh, which is kind of weird cuz you'd think if you're more sensitive to bitter flavors, you wouldn't like it. It 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're totally wrong about, and here we used to believe that people avoid eating bitter foods because bitterness is an indicator of poison. Uh, 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 3 different countries, Australia, US, England, so this is kind of a big study, 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 4 more cups a day. And that's remarkable because we were totally wrong on our assumptions about bitterness. What's interesting too is that bitters, which 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 Asprey Game Changers and picked up a copy of the book. It officially comes out on December 5th, 2019, and you can preorder it right now. The reason you want to order this book is that it would take you 1/4 of an entire year to listen to about 500 episodes of Bulletproof Radio if you listened for 8 hours a day, 5 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 4 hours. So your ROI is 500 hours of your time or 4 hours. Buy the book Game Changers. It's gonna tell you what noteworthy people do to make themselves noteworthy in order. You're not gonna copy what one person did to be successful. You're gonna learn what most people agree on and learn rules based on 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 Changers book.

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Now, speaking of noteworthy people, People who do unusual things that are worth paying attention to. I have a special guest for you today. His name is Garrett Gee. He's actually a second cousin to Allie Gee. Okay, not really, but Garrett Gee is known as, uh, or I say is the founder of the Bucket List Family. And 3 years ago, he and his wife Jessica sold nearly all their belongings and set off to travel the world with their 2 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 turned 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 traveling 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 as the least qualified or feeling that way, I, um, I have a big brother who turned me on to 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 I told her, I was like, I don't know if I can do it. I think you should go on for me. If you 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.

So 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, you're kind of playing it cool. Um, and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is, is that you have displayed a an amazing level of humility. I know a good number of people who've made shocking amounts of money in their lives. 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. 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, you know, they're feeding orphans and actually doing valuable good work. But they sort of, you know, it's a path that a lot of people go down. You did a very radically different thing where you like tightened up the purse strings, if anything, and like, I'm just going to sell everything, have a garage sale, we're just going to go. 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. 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 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, um, build up a new savings, and just stay young and keep hustling.

You started, uh, the company you started called Scan was turned down on Shark Tank but ended up becoming a technology that Snapchat used for Snapcode. So 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, 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 for 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, which was a passion for me during that time. And yeah, so there was 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 3 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 like super—

See, that was the messed up thing, is everybody knew I was working hard on my iPhone app, right? 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, like 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 Gee 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 in 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 million or something 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, like, why don't we go to Vegas?" And like, "We can't afford it." He goes, "No, I'm chartering a jet. And they're like, what? Like, oh my God. So, but for him, it was a similar story where like he just wanted to be a normal guy instead of everyone looking at him kind of weird and like wondering if they wanted something and 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. I mean, did that stress you out?

Not so much. 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 acting normal about it and just treating me the same. But that all came to a crashing halt when it all came spilling out. And so I don't know if you remember this, there was a movie that came out called The Interview with James Franco. and they were making fun of North Korea, more or less. And North Korean hackers got offended, hacked Sony Studios emails. The CEO of Sony sat on the board of Snapchat, and so the acquisition of my company by Snapchat had to be approved, or at least go through this CEO of Sony. So when the emails of Sony got hacked, all of my information about the acquisition, like, not just my name and the amount of the acquisition, like my bank account, my routing number, like all of that information were in these emails. And so I remember the evening, it was actually my wife's birthday and I went to work like any day and I'm sitting at my desk and all of a sudden my colleague sitting next to me is like, Garrett, you're going to want to see this. I roll over and I think it was a Business Insider because all the journalists were just digging into these emails, seeing what goodness they could find. And it was a Business Insider article and it just said like Snapchat confidentially acquires Utah startup by Garrett Gee, Scan, for $54 million. And then it just had screenshots of the emails, negotiations, bank account information, and it was all right there. I mean, yeah. And that's when my life changed very quickly.

And by this time though, had you started the Bucket List Family? Were you already doing that? No.

Okay. No. If you would've asked me at that time like, what do the next 5 years look like for you? I would have said, well, I'm gonna stay here at Snapchat, work as long as it feels like the right thing for me, and I guess that'll probably be like 3 to 5 years that I'll be here at Snapchat.

Wow.

The day after that happened, my answer changed very quickly just because my life changed quite upside down.

So, there you go. Thanks, North Korean hackers.

I guess so, actually.

It probably pushed you in a very unique direction.

Yeah.

All right, so now all of a sudden you've sort of been outed as a wealthy individual rather than just one of the team sort of perspective. And you said, "All right, to heck with this. I'm going to start the Bucket List Family." And I guess you already started your family, but you decided that you were going to go out and travel the world. What drove that specific decision? I mean, it's so random, to be perfectly honest. Traveling the world isn't, but that way. Yeah.

It was a really difficult decision, the actual decision to leave Snapchat. And I remember I had been speaking with my wife and said, you know, I think I want to leave Snapchat. And she's like, well, if you leave, what are you going to do? And when I had left school, I left school right before my senior season of soccer. And there was this weird situation, if you don't mind me sharing this story. I don't, I don't think I've ever shared this before, actually. So I'm going into my senior season of of soccer at BYU. And that is the time when the acquisition happened. That's when Evan at Snapchat initially contacted me, made an offer for my company. And I said, yes, I want to join. I'm about to start my senior season of soccer. Can I finish soccer and then come join the company? And initially he had agreed to that. He said, okay, that's cool. Let's do that. And then during negotiations, it got to the point where he said, look, I want you to come join my team immediately. I don't want you to wait till soccer. And if you'd be willing to quit soccer, I will raise that price of the acquisition another $10 million.

Oh.

And truthfully, what happened, I was on the phone with him and just my gut reaction, as foolish as it might sound, just the truth is my gut reaction is I said, thank you for the offer. but no, I'm going to stay and I'm gonna play soccer. So let's keep the price of the acquisition down. And I think if I were to try to explain myself in that craziness is it, it just is what felt right inside me, felt right inside my heart. And I think kind of logically I was trying to explain to myself that I have the rest of my life to make money and to work, but I only have one senior season of my soccer career left, and then I'm done forever, and all the money in the world can't buy that back. So you know what, I'm going to stay and play soccer. That's, that's what my mind was going through. Um, I hung up with him, and I think it was like 2 minutes later that I was on the phone with my co-founder, and I realized, you know what, that decision doesn't just affect me, it affects my partners and my investors and everyone else. And I just felt so foolish. So immediately I called back Evan and I said, I think I half lied to him and I said, you know what, I'm too excited to join the company. Let's bring the price back up another $10 million and done deal. And that was the final call for the negotiations and the deal was final. And so going back, I guess the roundabout of that story is when I joined the company Snapchat, I missed my senior season of soccer, at least I told the coach I was going to. But with all the North Korea madness and the hacking and me leaving Snapchat just 3 months later, I coincidentally left Snapchat one day before my senior season of soccer was starting, and the coach was gracious enough to let me back on the team to finish my season. Wow.

So it all worked out.

Madness. Wow.

Well, thank you for sharing that. And for people listening, it just Can you imagine? Like, this actually happened. This sort of stuff isn't that rare. I've been involved in M&A, and there's times when, you know, for whatever reason, deals can change radically like that.

Right.

I love it that you just shared that. It's awesome because that's the inside story that no one ever hears.

Well, and that's how the Buckless family eventually came about because I remember telling my wife, okay, I'm going to leave Snapchat. And she says, what's next? And I said, well, coincidentally, I have one day to get back to Utah and rejoin the soccer team. And in her mind, that's where we went to school together. That was kind of a step backwards in life, and I understood that. So I kind of made the deal with her, like, let me go back and play soccer, and you can choose what we do next in life. And we weren't sure, like, where we wanted to settle down. We weren't— it didn't feel right to, like, build a house and in a way, like, grow up. And so she came up with the idea, let's travel for a few months, see the world, learn more about ourselves and the world around us, and then we'll pick a place to call home. And, uh, It was in that planning of what was initially going to be 3 to 4 months of travel that just exploded out of control and eventually became the Bucket List Family.

You guys already knew each other. You met on your missions in Russia. Correct. And was it Vladivostok? Vladivostok. I was like, Vladivostok something.

One of those.

I haven't been to Russia. So you guys already knew each other and you'd already traveled the world pretty, at least to some parts of the world. But she still had the travel bug, you kind of did, and you said, "All right, let's do this." What was it like when you said, "All right, I'm going to not just do this, but I'm going to share this and video and photos," and you build an Instagram channel and kind of report on your own lifestyle? Because it changes your mindset a lot. We talk about how anytime you're doing selfies, you're doing social media, it sort of takes you out of the present moment and puts you somewhere else. But you're doing it not just for you, but for your kids, you know, your whole family. How did that change the experience for you to sort of be behind the lens or in front of the lens, whatever side?

I mean, in that sense, I really like it because I'm not very good at relaxing or just doing nothing. And so, say if a family just goes to the pool, I'm not good at just like sitting sunbathing, reading. Uh, I, I've always gotta be doing something hands-on, active, a little bit of more like added purpose to my day. And, uh, for us at least, the social media kind of does that where we're like on a mission to accomplish something, to capture something. And so we try to, always keep the mindset less of like, let's get an epic photo or let's take a really cool selfie, and more so like, let's do something meaningful with our day and capture it in a memorable way. And so I think it's the mindset going into it that's very important. But if we were— when we initially left on our travels, my wife and I had very different mindsets. If you were to ask us like, what are you doing with these travels around the world? For her, it kind of was just a 3-month, 4-month family vacation to different countries. Um, but again, for me, because I'm bad at just vacationing or doing things just because, I think it was the entrepreneur inside me that wanted to make something more of it. And so just kind of on the side, with half of my wife's support, is when I started the YouTube channel and the Instagram, The Bucket List Family.

How has it affected your kids to be, quote, stars that way?

Oh man, uh, we've been very careful and cautious and tried to be very aware of how it's affecting them. I remember the first time my daughter even said the words "The Bucket List Family," and I was like, whoa, who told you that? Like, what is that? Do you know what The Bucket List Family is? Uh, because, you know, until then we were just Mom, Dad, the G family, regular family. And the first time she brought it up is because, uh, even when you watch our own videos, we are very slow to ever like call ourselves The Bucket List Family. It was just kind of like that was the title, that was the brand behind us, but we were just a regular old family. But yeah, so as far as I would hope, it's brought our children a lot of unique opportunities. But as far as how it's affected them personally, the social media, not so much. They just started school for their first time, so it's new to them to be around other kids and maybe that brings something into it.

They're pretty young still. How old are your kids?

My daughter just turned 6, my son just turned 4, and then we have a baby who's 10 months. Yeah.

Got it. I remember when my son was around 6 or 7, someone had said something because of the books and the Bulletproof stuff, and he said, "Daddy, are you famous?" And I'm like, "No, there's real famous out there. I'm not real famous." But more people know about me than average. Tiny. And he's like, "All right, that's cool. But we were just in Hawaii." And by the way, you've just moved to Hawaii. So we were there last week and we're at dinner and a couple of people are like, "Are you Dave?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." So selfie and pouring Brain Octane on sushi and whatever. So I think the kids kind of know, people know, but so far they're not on social media, so it doesn't really matter. But there will come a time when my kids do have social media accounts in another few years and I'll be like, "Well, that'll be interesting." When are your kids gonna get social media accounts?

Well, they actually have each had their own social media, like Instagram account since the day they were born. Wow. I mean, I have our baby before he was born, he had something, I think 150,000 people following him when his profile pic was just his like prescreening photo. And you know, they're all like verified on Instagram. I think they have like 300,000 followers and all that. But those accounts, I think they're totally unaware of their own accounts. I just keep those. We never do like brand deals or anything sponsored on those. Those are just their personal journals. It's almost like, at least when I started them, it's like my gift to them. I want them to be able to look back and almost see a daily journal of how their upbringing was. And, you know, I don't know if I'll ever turn it over to them. If my girl becomes a teenager and starts posing and doing all these selfies and breaks my heart. Yeah, I don't know if I'll ever turn it over, but so we'll see. Up until now, they have no idea. You'll never see us in a video like asking for subscribers or likes or anything like that because we don't want our kids to be aware of that yet.

That is, uh, that's so healthy. It's also so unusual. So you, you grew up in a Mormon household, uh, is that where you got sort of the, the— I don't know what to call it, like level-headedness around this sort of stuff? Because it's pretty unusual. I don't hear a lot of parents out there who are sort of that, I don't know if I'll ever give my kids social media, that sort of thing. Where did you get that?

I don't know. I would hesitate to say that it comes from a Mormon culture community because right now Mormons just rock the blogger and YouTuber world. Mormons for whatever reason are so good at it. But I would also say that downside— Internet marketing in general. Yeah. But I'd say the downside is Mormons are very competitive and just hustlers. And because of that, if you watch most any other typical YouTuber or blogger, they'll just be all about the likes and the followers and the subscribers. And so, yeah, so I'm not sure if I have an answer to that even.

Well, so if it didn't come from your community, I mean, parental thing, you have a mixed background.

I do have a mix. I would say this. I have wonderful parents, an amazing father, an amazing mother. A lot of, or, you know, most any goodness in me definitely came from them. But also the hard side of things too, where I come from a broken household where my parents got a divorce. And I think a lot of just the hard times kind of instilled a fear forever inside me of I want to be the best parent possible. I want to have the strongest marriage possible. And I just seen a lot of things can go wrong. So be grateful for what you have. And that goes back to how the money was, you know, money can change people for the worse, it can also do good. So be humble with it and hope for the best.

How are you going to teach your kids lessons about money?

It's a good question. They, as far as I can understand, they don't know that we're rich. The travels definitely helped with that where we had a rule. They have a small Fall Raven backpack and their rule with toys is they can only have as many toys as would fit in this small backpack and they had to carry their own backpack during our travels. So, if they're ever complaining about their backpack, it would be like, "Oh, the easy solution, just throw away some of your toys and your backpack will get lighter." And they either threw away some of their toys or they toughened up and they carried their own backpack. But either way, every time we would pack, which was literally once a week because we'd switch countries week after week, they would have to reevaluate like what toys they had, what they wanted to keep, and what they wanted to get rid of. If they wanted something new, that meant getting rid of something old. And I think that that kind of instilled in them at a young age the meaning of money and objects, you know, having things over experiences in a pretty good way.

That's a fascinating approach. I think I might have to take that on with my kids. My son insisted on bringing a very large stuffed animal that took up half his suitcase. I'm like, "Seriously, just leave that one home." But he was very glad to bring it.

That's awesome.

All right. This is helpful. The reason I'm asking these questions is everyone listening to this, I'll just tell you, if you're fortunate enough to have a device that lets you listen to a podcast, you're already exceptionally wealthy compared to large numbers of people on the planet.

For real.

And so how you teach your kids, even if you see yourself as middle class or you're just starting out, a lot of people don't know this. I worked in an auto parts warehouse for 5 years putting parts in boxes, paid my way through college, scooped ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.

No way.

And so I've definitely worked for a living for much of my life. And you can easily get caught in a mindset that says, I don't have enough. In Game Changers, in my new book, one of the laws there is about money because I'm asking people what matters most and almost no one said money mattered most. But one thing that a few people did say was about how having money didn't make them happier. And so I actually dug in on the scientific research about how much money it takes to increase happiness. And I gave a talk at the Bulletproof Conference on it even. And it turns out the numbers this is from a couple years ago, it's about $74,000 American. It's probably adjusted a little bit more if you're in California or something. Above that, another $1,000 doesn't make you any happier. It's convenient, it's nice. I learned this the hard way too, because when I was about the same age you were when you made money, I made $6 million. I was 26 years old. The company that held Google's first servers, Facebook's first servers, when they were just Facebook. I just remember I was no happier with the money. I was kind of like elated. And then I told a friend, I'll be happy when I have $10 million. And you're like, if you can't be happy with $6 million, I'm pretty sure $10 million will change it. But I just had this story in my head. It doesn't sound like you ever bit on that even a little bit, which is so different. I mean, did you get happier when you got your $54 million?

I will say in the early days of my company where I just remember people would always say like, oh man, I was so much happier when I was poor. And I'm like, well, you're just bad at having money then because I was poor and poor sucks. I remember being pulled over and I had to pay a $300 ticket and I had $330 in my bank account and it just broke my heart. I'm just there crying in my car because there it goes. You know, that's everything. And those days for sure were not more happy than when I had money. But it's like I could almost relate to that $70,000 mark where when we started making money from my own app and getting past that mark, it wasn't necessary that I was happier, but there were a lot of stresses in my life that started to ease up. And man, that's something that I wish the whole world could experience. You know, when you, when you see the burdens of finances on somebody, yeah, anyone who's ever experienced that and remembers that pain, you just wish you could take that away from every single person. But yeah, but then it got to a level where it's just when you're getting like those, those crazy numbers up into the millions and onward, then it just becomes almost more of a game and less about like actual money. You know, it's just numbers at that point, right? And it's a very weird thing for your human brain to go through.

It is. And I really, I resonate with that thing about what could we do to make it so people don't have to go through those stresses. I remember getting tickets when I had similar amounts of money in the bank. And you're like, this is, you know, 50% of what— of my entire liquid everything. Uh, so tickets are particularly regressive and what they don't tell you, but is borne out in the data, the crappier your car, the more likely you are to get pulled over and get a ticket. So if you're driving a, you know, Mercedes or some luxurious, even a new Prius, right? If you do something stupid, you're going to get pulled over. But if you're doing something only a little bit stupid, you won't get pulled over, but the beater car next to you will get pulled over almost every single time. And, and even worse if your skin is brown. Right. And, uh, so that's a problem because if the poorer you are, the more you get hit with stuff like that. It's, it's really a stressor. So I'm, one of the things I'm thinking about now is, you know, how do we remove the dumb little stressors, um, that really cost you a lot when you don't have a lot, uh, in a way that's, you know, that's more fair, uh, because no one wins in a situation where everyone's more stressed and, you know, exactly. There's food quality stress, there's just, you know, financial safety stress. What have you done from a charitable perspective to reduce stress? Or even if it's not charity, like, what have you done to help solve that problem?

That's been a constant learning experience for us since the beginning. And I will— props to my wife, charity and service and just being so compassionate to others. That's something that comes very natural to her, just a very good soul. For me, I'll admit that it does not come natural, and that's why it's been so good for me not only to be with her, but also during these bucket list family travels, we made 3 priorities. One was to seek out adventure in every country we visit, seek out culture in each country, and then seek out a service opportunity. And so because we were visiting a different country almost every week, that meant we were on the lookout for a special service opportunity every single week. And it was really good for me and just taught me the beauty and the power of service because, I mean, sometimes they were well organized. We would put together like a fundraiser for an orphanage. We built a school in India. We, we had raised $50,000 in Nepal for education and against human trafficking. And sometimes there were bigger things like that. But a lot of it, it was like a quick country, a quick visit to Antigua or Bahamas or something smaller. And then it was, let's seek out someone who just stands out to us. I remember one was a waitress at a restaurant, and you could just see in her face that she needed a little bit of a lift in her life. And so, you know, we put some money in an envelope, gave it to our little girl, had her walk it over to her, and then, and then bounced. You know, she probably doesn't know who we are, has no idea where we came from, but we could just see it in her face that she needed that. And so we've had a pretty good spread of some big events and then some small smaller acts of service. But it's hopefully done some good in the world. It's definitely changed us as a family.

Beautiful. It reminds me of Oprah, who I've had the honor of meeting one time briefly.

Amazing.

One of her quotes is she says, "I never get tired of leaving money for people." So, she's known for hiding $20 bills everywhere she goes and stuff like that. And it does spread joy and she knows at her level it's invisible. It doesn't cost her anything other than the inconvenience of probably having an assistant go to the ATM for her to get $20. You know, she's not going to notice.

Um, each year my wife will do something really cool for Christmas where she puts together just some really bomb Christmas surprise that we share with others. And the first year, my wife asked herself the question like, what am I most grateful for this year and how can I share it with others? And my wife that year had had received LASIK eye surgery and went from a lifetime of wearing glasses and contacts, and all of a sudden she can see perfectly without anything. Seeing after like a 3-minute procedure. And so we surprised 5 people with LASIK eye surgery, 5 people that wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise, and they received that. Uh, and we've done that, something of that sort, each year. And this year I think my wife's just outdone herself. She's doing something really cool that she put together all by herself. We're doing the 12 Days of Bucket List Christmas where we've taken our top 12 experiences around the world and we're going to surprise families in need with these experiences. So a family is going to have the opportunity to stay in a castle in Ireland, to stay in an over-the-water bungalow in the Maldives, go shark diving in Fiji. We have these 12 experiences all around the world. They're just incredible. Even when she was showing me them, like, I got jealous all over again. I want those experiences. But how cool that we're going to be able to gift those to 12, uh, surprise families this year.

Are you choosing those from families you've met, or are these coming from the followers on The Bucket List Family?

So we don't do it as like a typical giveaway on social media where it's like, comment on this post and you might win. We do a little different on our social media at the Bucket List Family where we invite our followers to nominate someone else who they think is deserving. So in a way, we're kind of like giving the gift of giving. And our followers have a lot of fun with it because they'll have a neighbor or a sibling or a cousin, someone who, you know, has been through some rough times or just might be a very good person who gives more than they receive and deserves something special. And yeah, so we'll read through thousands of nominations and those that stand out to us, we hand-select them. So it's not a random selection, it's not a sweepstakes, it's just a gift, better explained. Very—

that's beautiful. And it is life-changing when you think something like that would never happen and all of a sudden you get a chance to do it. I appreciate the way you're doing that. After 3 years of traveling the world, 78 countries, you said you decided to hang up your hat. Why did you decide to stop?

It was a tough decision to stop. The more and more we traveled, we just got better at it. The Bucket List Family as a business side of things just became more and more profitable. But I honestly, if it was just me, I'd have said, let's keep traveling. My wife was about 50/50. She loved the traveling, but also loves the beauty that can come with having a consistent place to call home and a community and friends. It came down to our kids. Our kids are just very social and we're becoming about that school age. And we could just, just knowing our children, we knew it was the best thing for them to find a place to call home. We'll continue to travel. We love to travel. We have another few countries that we're visiting before the year ends even. But now we have a place to call home here in Hawaii.

Nice. Why did you pick Hawaii after 78 countries where you could live?

I'll tell you, we were debating between Oregon, New Zealand, and Hawaii. And at first, New Zealand seemed to be the front runner. And I applied for a visa. We got approved for a visa. And that's when my wife got pregnant. And it was a little— it was a little too much for her to be that far away from family. With a new baby coming. So then we started to reconsider different options and we actually, then I think in second place, we were really considering Oregon and we found this sweet little haven, just this beautiful lot of land. And we went to look at it and spend some time on it. And I had these insane allergy attacks. Whatever type of grass was growing there, I couldn't breathe for 2 minutes. And so I was like, well, you know what? Like, I don't think this is going to be the best place for us. So then we took a— we met with a realtor in Hawaii and they took us around this island and we just found not only the perfect town and some good friends immediately, but we found this little sweet spot for our house. And it was this really, really old broken down beach bungalow over 100 years old, but had so much cute character to it. Was it— it's a small bungalow, but it's right on the water. And yeah, it just looked like where we could set up our own little haven.

Well, I know you just moved there. Check— keep an eye out for toxic mold. You got a humid environment, you got a 100-year-old house. It's a bit of an issue in Hawaii. I'm gonna— I'm gonna send you some stuff if you want it after the show from one of my companies, Homebiotic. It makes a bacterial spray that eats toxic mold so it can't grow. We sprayed some in our hotel room when we were in Hawaii last because there was actually some growing around the air conditioner in my daughter's bedroom, and it— oh my goodness— it digests the So if you're pulling walls out and stuff, spray some in there just to keep the levels down because that stuff affects everyone's brain. I love old houses. Some of them might not feel good. All right. Yeah. I'll hook you up. And just make sure you build clean because the last thing you want is— it's another one of the rules in Game Changers. If you push really hard, it sounds like you got your stress under control, or you get just environmental things that push your buttons and you can trip yourself up into having autoimmune and allergies. And the more entrepreneurial, the more type A you are, like the more you like to do stuff, the more high risk you are of like flipping the switch. And once you flip the switch, then you get more of those allergies like you had to the grass in, uh, in Portland or not Portland, in Oregon. And, um, and so, all right, I'm, I'm going to send that to you, uh, because I appreciate it. It's all $29, not, not an expensive gift, but it's one of those things where just the right, the right stuff at the right time could matter. And if you're remodeling with kids in the house, you got to know about that.

Exactly. Okay.

All right, so you're, you're moving in, your kids are going to be in, in a regular school and all that stuff. And you're going to, you're going to hang up the bucket list family hat, you're going to call us like the school list family. What's going to happen with all your travel blog?

I mean, just, just like our lives, we're just going to try to find a balance between traveling and being at home. And that'll be a challenge with social media where a lot of our followers know us as just full-time traveling family. Every single week you're going to see us in a new city, in a new country. And now they're, uh, they're going to experience something different along with us. And it'll be interesting to see how many people stick along with us. I think, um, one thing we've done really well is it wasn't always necessarily about the travels. A lot of our followers understood that the Bucket List Family might come across as something about travel initially, that might be the COVID of the book. But once you dive into the contents of what we're really about, it's about family, it's about growing together, it's about parenthood, the children, being brave, stepping outside your comfort zone, and a lot of those things that continue onward even if you are just living life at home and adventuring in your own backyard. So we'll see. But yeah, the plan is we'll continue doing The Bucket List Family, a new video every week on our YouTube channel. And a new post almost every day on our Instagram account. And we'll see how it evolves from here.

Beautiful. Garrett, if someone came to you tomorrow and said, I want to perform better at everything I do as a human being, and just based on everything you know, including having sold your company for like $54 million before you're 30, traveled the world to 78 countries, had a successful marriage, built a social media— like, you've done all sorts of crazy stuff, especially, you know, you're relatively young for this long list of accomplishments. So, 3 most important pieces of advice based on all the cool stuff you've done, what would they be?

Oh man, you want 3? Um, the first one that pops to my mind is good friends. Um, one second. Yeah, that one gets me in the heart. Um, Good friends. And I think for me, the secret sauce to that isn't like friends with connections, friends that can hook you up, friends with a lot of money or smart friends. But if you have good friends that support you, have your back through thick and thin and truly love you, that just gives you a confidence and a motivation to do the right thing, to be a good person and to make the most of, of your life and your opportunities. And that's what my friends have always been to me. The second thing I would say is optimism, just a ridiculous amount of optimism, that like dumb level of yes-man optimism, no matter what it is. I think people who know me well consider me naive in a lot of ways. But if you were to ask me, it's just a ridiculous level of optimism that things are going to work out and that I can do anything if I want to. And that's, man, if I could gift something to anyone or everyone, I think it would be that level of optimism that I have inside me and sharing it with others. Because when I look at others and I, you know, whether it's people who have worked with me in the past or worked for me in the past, man, they are smarter than me and they are more talented than me. But one thing I might have up on them is just a little more optimism and confidence. That they seem to be lacking for no apparent reason because they have everything, and I wish I could give that to them.

Beautiful. So we've got good friends, we've got optimism. Number 3.

Number 3, to help someone achieve their goals.

Or more just to help someone perform better everything they do, right? Because everything you do, there's service, there's community, there's feeling good, there's family, there's work. We're all being humans all the time, but it's It's not just, you know, it's not just goal achieving, but it's like being better at everything.

All right. I think, who knows if this is a good one, but this is what's coming to my mind, and that is having the right intentions. Because I think if you have the right intentions, then it's just a win-win situation, you know, where people all day could say like, well, should you have sold your company or should you have not sold your company? Should you be spending the money you made or not? Is the bucket list family a good thing? Should you be putting your kids on social media? Like, there's so many ways that you can doubt yourself. And even the word success or doing better, you know, that's such like a relative thing. There's no like true definition. It's just your perspective. And I think that winds back to if you have pure intentions, there's no arguing with that. Nobody can ever say like you did the wrong thing by doing this. And it's like, look, I had the right intentions. I might have messed up. I might have done the wrong thing. But if you have good intentions, then it's a win-win situation. And it's just life. You're going to mess up, you're going to mistake, you're going to fall short. But having the right intentions will just give you that pure confidence that it's going to work out.

Beautiful. I love that advice. The win-win perspective on that is it's easy to say and it's hard to live. But from what I can see, it looks like you're actually living it, which is admirable and unusual. Dave, thanks for doing that. Thanks for sharing your story on Bulletproof Radio. Your blog is— is it thebucketlistfamily or bucketlistfamily.com?

Uh-huh. Yeah, our website is thebucketlistfamily.com and our Instagram is @thebucketlistfamily.

All right, thebucketlistfamily. Totally worth following because you're just kind of going out there doing interesting stuff. I really think that for people listening to the show today, just hearing the way you think about why you do the things you do is inspirational. Instructional and it's just an example of what can happen when you don't let success go to your head. So, very well played, my friend. Very well played.

I appreciate it. I'm grateful for you having me on and I'm grateful that I survived. Speaking of people who are smarter and more talented than me, I was scared to come on here and I'm grateful that I'm still going.

Well, thanks about sending your brother instead.

I'll let him know.

All right. Have a beautiful day.

Yeah, you too. Thank you so much.

If you liked today's episode, you know what to do. Head on over to thebucketlistfamily.com and subscribe. Thanks for listening.

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