Garrett Gunderson 0:00
The stock market’s irrelevant now, $1.5 trillion was lost from the market today. Not true that money didn’t evaporate. It went into someone else’s hand, right? No big company raises public capital. It’s all private capital at all. 100% I have to consistently remind myself it’s not my job to behave like these people, how they’re living right now. It’s to learn how they behaved when they were where I am right now. The

Justin Donald 0:22
more money that’s printed, the less valuable it is. If you’re sitting in cash, you’ve got a depreciating asset. There’s

Garrett Gunderson 0:29
a lot of crazy happening politically, there’s a lot of volatility. Is now the time to buy into assets?

Brad Weimert 0:36
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million.

Garrett Gunderson 1:16
I’m not one to like respond to ads, but if I didn’t know Justin, I would buy his book from his newest ad, it says, hearing that the guy that quietly built wealth is now showing everyone else how to do it. I was like, Dude, I love it. I was like, Well, I’ve hearted it. I don’t even heart stuff, so for me to even heart it, thank you. I’m stingy. I

Unknown Speaker 1:33
appreciate it. Well,

Brad Weimert 1:34
even better, as Justin has no idea what ads are running or what goes out at all.

Garrett Gunderson 1:38
And what’s cool is, like my book and Justin’s book on two of the lists are like, you could see him on the same screen. That’s cool. Amazon, that’s cool. I’m selling more books. He’s making more money. So I think that he’s winning. But still, I feel like I should learn some stuff so I can write a book. Yeah,

Justin Donald 1:54
you should totally write a book. You know, all you need to know, write a book. I

Garrett Gunderson 1:57
don’t want to write a book, not now. I like writing. I want to make more money. And then write a book, telling

Justin Donald 2:01
you it can be fun where, you know, right now, I think you feel like it’s a job, yep, but I do can actually be a therapeutic process, where, instead of writing or typing, which to me, seems like ago, I like that, you do like it, and you’re a good writer, I actually like, you know, my strength is talking, so I just paid everything. I’ll just record myself speak, you know, hey, I have this idea, and I’ll just iterate. I’ll just record, and I’ll be walking around in nature, and that to me I get and who takes it from there? So the the AI transcribes it, and then I can send it on to an editor. Well,

Garrett Gunderson 2:33
here’s the deal, like, your life was good before your book, your life’s even better after correct the relationships your book has built, for sure, you know so many great people, because you’ve shared all this and like, again, that’s why I love the ad. Like you did quietly do it. You weren’t flashy, you weren’t like, you’re not you’re not over the top talking about you like you’re so subtle about it, until someone gets in a real conversation, and it’s not like you’re bragging about you do, but you have the depth of knowledge, and you’re like, Oh, damn, this guy, like, knows it, right? So I just think that it’s like watching your community grow. That community doesn’t grow without that book. I like the brand. I like the books correct your 10 rules. Like, if I were to know those 10 rules in my 20s, I’d be wealthier, just like your whole like, get the money, get the so it’s house money. Get the money off the table as quickly as possible. I think of how many investments I could have done that with and didn’t do it with, and how it bit me so. And the fact that, like you, wrote a financial book that I 100% agree with, and I wrote financial books that you own, I would say that I do like probably 99 out of 100 people that read our books would disagree with something in our books, but we both agree with the statements that each other makes. Well, I think the other, significant thing about Justin is that he’s not on a podium preaching that this is the right way to do it. He’s saying, This is my path. If you want to invest from a lifestyle investment perspective, which is what I wanted, this is what you should do. And it basically every opportunity for contest, he’ll be like, yeah, no, that’s a fine path too. You’re gonna have a different outcome. We’re a fine path too. What I love about the example, too, for the Justin fest here that we’re about to go on is that he was masterful at not only lifestyle creep take over, yeah, like even, even when you bought my fucking used car, bro. I mean, the thing is, it’s a nice car. I love this. It’s a win, win. It was financially independent before millionaire. It’s a catch one that’s amazing. And then you kept going, which is such an advantage. When you’re financially independent, you have a 10 times advantage over someone who’s not because they’re still stuck in the I’m saving 10% of my income, and then 90% goes to everything else. You’re like, cool. 100% my income can build more assets, that’s right. And so be like, how did you get that far, that fast? Is that you, instead of when you got there, said, Cool, now I’m going to explode my lifestyle. You’re like, you know, now you’ve got your own sommelier and you’re traveling, but it’s well within your means. It’s not even pushing the edge of within the means. No, it’s not even, it’s ridiculous, right? Like, bought my fucking used car. He’s, he’s, he’s, order, he’s multiples of me. Me, and he’s buying my used car while I buy something dope, which, by the way, I’m pretty fucking frugal, so, like, it took me many years of making a lot of money, relatively speaking, to spend any money in a car. Yeah, I was different than that. Yeah, I bought a commercial building when I was in my 20s. It was 45,000 square feet. I own 45% of it, and it and it was one of, like, architectural awards, and was a little bit of a stretch for where I was, yeah, and so, like, I looked bigger than I was. Did a bite at the time. I would have just more because of my partner. Yep, yeah, because of the partnership. You know, I didn’t have the money to buy it out. When I’m in partnership, more with landed. I handle handle it because he had too much real estate. And if I would have been more liquid, I could have got, as I could have just bought that out for super cheap. And it was like, it just wasn’t a good decision to be 100% owner at that time, yeah. And yet it was fully, you know, rented at that point, and it had a good cap rate, had all the things. But it was like, because he was going bankrupt, it was like, it was cash offer at that point. And I was like, man, like, it moved fast, you know, there was no getting financing. So, so that’s an interesting, sort of, like overarching question of, Do you Do you stretch a little bit to put yourself in a position where you create, potentially create motivation that will drive you to work harder and make more? Or do you knowing that that’s a good opportunity? Or do you say, Hey, this is going to put me in an uncomfortable position and push me too much, and I might be out over my skis. My problem with pushing too much is you make bad decisions for the people you serve, because now it becomes about your survival and not your service. And so I didn’t like that whole notion. That’s almost like boiler room carries like you know, act as if you know, and buy the vehicle before you can afford it, and it’s going to force you to and like, sales people get in that trap a lot of times where, like, they spend optimism, this is a good month, next month will be better. And so they constantly run that red line. Now at the same time, I know that Justin, you reallocate funds quickly into investments. So your team’s like, why don’t we sit on that longer? Yeah. And you’re more like, sure, because I want more assets. So that’s where that line is is, you know, I think that, and especially like me being married with kids, I pushed too hard, too fast, and it was, I didn’t really have an end in sight. It was just like, more real estate started, a fund started, I was just doing all this, and it was just consuming so much time. And now I’m looking at it going, what does that cost me from a lifestyle standpoint, and will I be able to be present? Like, I just hit the point where I don’t want any more lifestyle investments, from a standpoint of, like, I bought a home. It’s beautiful. Like, I don’t want anything more than that. I bought less cabin. It’s amazing. I’m done to real estate, right? So now, like, I bought a second cabin, because I was like, well, we have more people sometimes than I can handle the cabin, so I buy a second one, and now I’m going, maybe I should sell it, because it’s, it’s more management. I have to hire someone to support with it. Which ones I have to manage that person? And so I’m, for the first time in my life, I’m like, I don’t think that more is better. I think actually less might be like more, because now I have time off. Now I can travel without worrying about it. Now I have one less employee to manage. So, so, so I love that. And the flip side of that is like Justin. I were just talking about this the other day, because Justin basically pushes everything to assets. In the last several years, I’ve just been sitting on cash, just like stacking cash and sitting on it. And the flip side of that for me, or how that’s manifested with me, is that I feel like I’m fucking stupid because I’m sitting on cash, which is making nominal stupid right now, though, do you I feel pretty good right now, but I still feel like, you know, if, in this moment, in, you know, April of 25 sitting on cash, you can get four to 5% just sitting which is better than my lifetime with cash sitting true, literally in checking accounts with Schwab or something, literally, yeah, and it’s not making 10 or 15 or 20, right? Because this is where stewardship comes in, sitting in cash like I just remember there was a time where I was comfortable with cash because my business growth was there. But then when I saw like, 2020, happen, and I could see quantitative easing, I was like, I have to allocate capital now, for sure, because the battery life on my cash is being dwindled, that cash is becoming worth less, so I’ve got to deploy it to assets. That’s why I bought the cabin I bought, and that immediately went up substantially in value. But I was also utilizing it and enjoying it. It wasn’t really a cash flowing asset. It could be, well, my wife’s like, we’re not going to cash flow that, yeah, not letting other people in there. And I’m like, Cool. I’m and then I have this mentor. I’m gonna see him tonight, and they, they mentor John fetzker, who used to own the Detroit Tigers and became a billionaire, and he lived in the same home his whole life. And I was like, I don’t want to live that level, yeah, where it’s but I was telling my wife, I’m like, what if we said we lock in our lifestyle where it is we we’re pretty much doing what we want to do, mostly when we want to do it, we have everything we want, other than one thing that I just don’t know that the juice is worth the squeeze a private jet, right? I just don’t know, even if I have the finances to handle it, is it worth it? Yeah, right. Because they

Justin Donald 9:59
burn. We’re gonna be talking about that tomorrow night. We’re all in that we’re all in that boat. Yeah. I mean, that is the one thing you know. So in my life today, I think I’m moving towards more simplicity than anything. And I just think everything we’ve talked about are trade offs, right? So, like being aggressive? Well, I think the younger you are, the more aggressive you should be when you don’t have dependents when you don’t have, you know, those sorts of things. But it is still a trade off. Bump in the road doesn’t have the same issue, that’s right? And, you know, sitting in cash, like there are a lot of benefits to that, yeah, trade off is maybe you’re not earning as much, but it gives you optionality, right? Whereas, whenever I’m in cash, I feel like I need to put it to work, like I don’t like sitting in cash because, you know, I feel like I’m not earning what inflate what you’re you’re an

Garrett Gunderson 10:43
investor first, yeah. And then lifestyle came after, he’s a business owner first, right? So it’s, there’s a little different kind of viewpoint there. And I look at, like, my investments now, I have 10 books, and I look at those books as a piece of real estate, yeah, yep. And so I’m always like, you look at killing saber cows. It came out in 22,008 it’s still on the list. Crazy, because I’m still putting it out there, and I look at it like a piece of real estate that in 2023 I rewrote the whole thing. I cut out 30,000 words, added investor DNA, and it started coming back into the lists. And because I’m like, yeah, if you own real estate for that long, you’re gonna paint it, you’re gonna change out the carpet, you’re gonna update it. So why wouldn’t I take this asset that’s still performing, oh man, give it a facelift. And you gave lifestyle investor, you updated that book. That’s right, yeah, so 30% more content, but I love it, and I added, right? So for me, for me, I’m like, Cool. I can live where I want, and my books can perform. I don’t pay taxes on it unless I sell. There’s no location dependency. There’s just so much benefit to it. And now I’m looking at my other book that’s more popular than nine of them combined. Wow, one book which I thought was a throw away when I was first writing it, I never expected it be as big as it was. And now I’m licensing that to other people, because I think I can make it a monster financial book and compete with the biggest ones that have ever existed with bigger distribution. Because now I give a license to one person that probably represents at least 1000 or 2000 books sold per person. So imagine I do 500 of those in the next year, 500 times 1000 or 500 times 2000 that book, all of a sudden is one of the biggest financial books of all time. Well, think about it. It’s digital

Justin Donald 12:17
real estate, right? And potentially, yeah, and today’s day and age like that, IP becomes just as valuable, or more valuable than other things. I mean, naval Ravikant in his tweets, like, if you look at Eric Jorgensen, you know version of putting that together. He’s gonna be at our event next week, which I’m excited about. But you know, he did such a great job, naval and Eric at crafting this message. But if you pay attention to the underlying themes of it, it’s like, Hey, you actually need to monetize your or you can digitize and create IP around your ideas, your brand, beyond just your business. You can

Garrett Gunderson 12:57
right now. So I have two questions, and I want to tell you, Well, yeah, we have two questions here, right? One is the path of exactly what you just said, and how long is that really going to last, where you can monetize your own IP from an educational perspective and your brand, and what happens with with that? The other, before we get there, because I think that’s a longer conversation. Is we’re talking about, you know, sitting on cash and diving into assets and, you know, going into May of 2025, right now is now the time to get out of cash and deploy into assets. There’s a lot of volatility, there’s a lot of crazy shit happening politically. Is now the time to buy into assets? Or do you think we’re going to slide down? Depends on the type of asset, lot in real estate, for me, and I think I’ll let you speak to

Justin Donald 13:40
that. Yeah, and I think, like, foundationally, the premise of how I invest is going to simply be based on, this is monetary supply expands, you know, so do asset values. So if you’re sitting in cash, you’ve got a depreciating asset. If you’re in assets, you know, other real, tangible, digital or real estate, real assets, they’re expanding. So part of my reason, so it’s not like, can you

Garrett Gunderson 14:05
use other words for that that are less confusing for retarded people? Yes. So, like, the R words just coming out, I was talking about myself. So, so it’s fine. Also, no, it’s, you know, what’s funny about that is that usually when I use the word retarded, I use it literally, and I very, very consciously don’t use it derogatorily to mean stupid. I literally use it in the in the sense of the process is retarded. In this case, I just slipped and thought it was

Justin Donald 14:28
funny. Well, what I’ll say about it is, like, in more layman’s terms, the more money that’s printed, the less valuable it is. So if it sits in assets, assets are going to appreciate or expanded investment helps that asset. Yeah, right, as the dollars, you know, or granted or expand or whatever, and it’s just going to continue to happen. There’s no way we can get

Garrett Gunderson 14:49
out of using leverage or not using leverage too with that much cash, because no leverage, as long as you have a horizon, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, like, because if you buy an asset, as long go down and now you temporarily, yeah, but. It’s, it’s desired location. Yeah, it’s going to come back. Now I want to talk about books for a minute, because the first argument I have in favor of books, even with AI being so, making knowledge just free, yep, and succinct, is there’s an end of nostalgia. Just like I buy vinyl, I have records, and people, still, you go on vacation, people are reading books on their flights and in their chairs, and they have them on their nightstand and they have them in the back, like there’s something about the intimacy of that, and it’s also the physical copy means that you don’t have something interrupting you when you’re reading from a phone, it can interrupt you at any time you’re watching a video, it’ll interrupt you anytime. So I think there’s something of that. The second thing is, we can take our books and put it into the AI and actually have aI start being us in a form of like getting answers because of that body of work. I do think as time goes on, the more people use AI to do too much of the writing, the more homogenized it becomes, the less unique it is, but like, he’s using it to supplement it so that it sounds like reading instead of speaking. So that’s a great tool for it. So I don’t know. I mean, let me glad that I already have it. Yeah, I think that I’m going to use humor for my next books. So I think that makes it even more useful, because I’ve written this manuscript. It’s 20,000 words using humor to teach finance. I think that that’s going to be useful because the pictures that are going to be illustrated, and it’s easy to read. And I agree with all that right now, right now, but I don’t know all that for the next two, 510, I don’t know. Yeah, maybe less, but, yeah. But after that period of time, I don’t know that any of that’s relevant. I think that there’s still going to be this. I think we had the the transitional phase. We’re still going to want to live in a physical property well, but we may not want the digital you got it things, yeah, I just think it’s there’s a huge question mark around what you know knowledge means, what credibility means, and what that transition path looks like right now, there’s a big question of, like you just said, If you spit it into one of the AI engines, it’s clear I still have old people that are gonna read it well, that younger people well.

Justin Donald 16:58
And think about the whole idea of raving fans, you have a ton of raving fans. So when you build up that audience, and you have it because your podcast, you have people that you know they’re all in, they’re bought in. So you produce more content. They want your content because you have a relationship with them, or they they feel it connected to you, and have a relationship with you. So the argument of it being extinct in time, like I get that what AI can do now. I do think there are niches where AI is never going to touch it, or for a long time, isn’t going to touch it, but you can tell AI writing versus a real human right

Garrett Gunderson 17:34
now, right now? Well, here’s like. So I went and spoke at this event. There’s 2000 people there. I put a QR code up. I gave them an amazing free download of five amazing tools. 17% of the room took it. They bought 500 books and had it at a booth that was this booth was as a major Convention Center in Orlando. It was almost three quarters of a mile to walk to the booth, four hours and 20 minutes. I signed books. They had a drone filming 420 on purpose for I just thought that was great. Having us gone through. My wife was born on 420 It was perfect for her. Yes, you know. But I was like, even today, when I finished speaking a I used humor, and now that I use humor versus my intensity of old, I get approached way more because it’s just and then they want their book signed. If I’m giving something else, less people come up and talk to me because they’re taking an artifact with them. Yeah, even if it’s old, even if it’s an antiquated way, there’s something about I, you know, I wrote it, they have it. They have a signature in it. Maybe that’ll change. But for now, I think it’s, it’s got a little bit of legs to it. Oh, it definitely has legs to it. I mean, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no question about it. It’s just, we’ve seen in the last, you know, huge, probably 20% of our audience at easy pay direct, are people that sell education, right? And it’s in every possible vertical, from financial to real estate to a client. Yes, you are. It’s getting

Justin Donald 18:55
slot really. Education. Education is getting slower. People should, like all these online marketers are getting crazy

Unknown Speaker 19:02
that AI school

Garrett Gunderson 19:03
here in Austin has people three grades ahead. Already three grades ahead. It’s an AI school. AI is doing the teaching. Say more about that? I don’t know that. I just heard about it, and I even just saw that like China’s gonna make it, that they have to learn about AI in school. But I was just talking to this guy that created a ton of private colleges made hundreds of millions. His whole thing is he wants to have a thing called the great university. So your teachers Socrates for philosophy, and you’re having a one on one experience, but you actually agree at the end. So just think about how much time in school is wasted with people that you know, teachers that are tired. They’re dealing with students they’re they’re going from textbooks that are printed that are now out of date. Like when I went to college, our nutrition class taught the food pyramid. I was like, What the hell like? We know the food pyramid is garbage, and they were still teaching it. Because how long does it take to get the updated information and reprinting so and get it through the government to allow that to be the book that’s taught? Yeah, so if all of a sudden. You’re learning, and AI sees your pace and then goes to the next thing. You can skip ahead so much faster, because it’s cutting through all the noise and all the conjecture and all the, you know, tired teacher and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t know a ton of detail. I just heard about it because I just flew here, and they’re like, how did you hear about the school? So I don’t really have the citations for it. No, no, but, but the, I think, logically, the path is without question. All kids, all humans, learn differently. And so there are brilliant people that don’t want to sit, will not sit and read a book for 600 pages, but can get, can integrate the knowledge from the book, if they can interact and ask good questions and get to the answer faster than reading through all of the foundation new version of chat GPT. So I was, I was doing a master class last week, and I just as a for fun, I said, Write an emotional close about the Rockefeller method, using my voice and what it spit out. I just copied and pasted, forgot that I had done that I was going to go back, and I was like, I just read it. We had a 43% 43.11% upsell take, because that was the thing that I used for it. I was like, that’s crazy. I’ve never had that high, just higher than, higher than I’ve ever had. I’ve never had that. And I just didn’t even modify it. I just read the script. I was like, that’s insane. And then one of my clients is like, Hey, I asked chat, G, P, T, to describe you. Here’s the paragraph. I was like, holy shit. I couldn’t come up with that good copy about how to describe myself. It was, it was phenomenal. So like, how fast it’s advancing? Because the first version I used to do videos me versus chat, GPT and finance, and I would just cry because it’s all just homogenized, lowest common denominator, Dave Ramsey kind of garbage. And I was like, I’m just gonna go after it. It’s getting better, and it’s getting better fast. Yeah, yeah, no question about it. I just think about it in terms of the business model. Like I think about, you know, if your business model is education in a platform, how long will that last? And there’s always look, there’s always a question of, I think historically, there has always been a question of, did you hit the timing right for the business model? Right? Right? And we’re in a very Facebook like, hitting the right timing, everything you know, MySpace was long before right Friendster, long before Facebook. Did you hit the timing right? And by the way, you know, Myspace sold for a billion dollars to Google. So I think, right, yeah. Well, think about the con. Think about the Concord, that airplane. Remember how fast it could get to London. Then it had an issue. And so they had to right revamp, and they had to fix it. And you know which day they relaunched the Concord, September 11, 2001 Oh, yeah. So that went bankrupt. That’s just bad timing. Yeah, right. And so there is an element of that with anything you’re doing. Even the right relationship has such an element for something advancing. And I think the two industries that are already done are attorneys and teachers. Oh, god, it’s over. Yeah, I’m what? I sat on a flight next to a brilliant attorney, someone I know that I’ve referred to, and the entire time, he was using AI to write the plans. And I was like, well, now what I do is I use chat GPT with all the prompts, and then I send the document to the attorney, yeah, to see what I’m missing. Yeah. So now my last document, I set 30 minutes aside with the attorney. We were done in 21 minutes, and everything was done. So think about how much money I saved. The agreement I had before was $900 and it was simple, and I could have done it with GPT, with somebody like, Oh, you missed this. And do you really want that? And that’s cheap. I went to attorney’s first contract that Justin I have talked about, and I came back with a $12,000 bill. And I was like, Hey, calm the fuck down. I was like, first of all, you can’t send me a $12,000 bill without, like, letting me know that you’re gonna go into that crazy Vaseline area. Yeah, and I still haven’t heard back from them. But second, yes, like, you should be, you should. You can digest a bunch of that earlier, but if you know nothing about it, then you’re putting a lot of faith in the robots. I just switched banks because of AI, because the bank I was at, I looked at their cyber security, and I talked to someone that owns, you know, that runs private division, like for the ultra high net worth people, and he’s like, that bank spent this much. We spent 8.7 billion as a bank. Do you think your money’s safe over there? And by the way, we’re exposed to 1% for commercial lending, they’re exposed to 35% Wow. And I was like, Okay, I’m moving today. Yeah. I was like, damn. Because I was like, it’s just gonna be interesting. Because I even wonder what’s gonna happen to Bitcoin with seed phrases. I do too, because, like, what could AI could obviously figure that out, right? Huge, huge question of, look, that you want to go doomsday on this shit like, AI could break the entire financial infrastructure in an instant, and passwords, encryption, the whole thing could also change that people can’t lie anymore. That’s true.

Justin Donald 24:38
It’s pros and cons, right? And, you know, it’s, he

Garrett Gunderson 24:41
was so much more productive, yes, yeah. Like, right now, my cmo says He’s 10 times more productive because of AI,

Justin Donald 24:49
yeah, well, and it’s figuring out where you can do that, like, where can you get ahead, you know, on the legal stuff. I mean, I just negotiated a deal where I had to buy out some partners, and then I was bringing in. Some new partners. And I thought it should be pretty simple. When I got the bill, it was $90,000

Garrett Gunderson 25:06
I’m feeling good about my 900 I know you said $900 it was just but, I mean, it was the simplest of agreements. I know it was a revenue agreement, yeah,

Justin Donald 25:13
at that pricing guys, like big time firms, they they’re not gonna be able to keep charging those rates, no. And I love that. I absolutely love that. Because the last few years, I think I’m dropping a date on the table with your daddy grab there. Well, like

Garrett Gunderson 25:27
your little $12,000 pittance, you gotta do something to put something big on the table.

Justin Donald 25:32
Well, this is, this is the last thing that I want to be celebrated, guys. This is, this is pain. That’s a lot of wine. This is painful, yeah, and, you know, not as much as a seller, to be clear, but there is an argument to be made that you want to have the best legal advice, but yeah, to shortcut with AI and kind of get ahead,

Garrett Gunderson 25:50
I still want an attorney for, you know, right now, getting there was an issue, you know, I want someone to defend, yep, but I don’t want them doing the busy work and charging me their full hourly wage for it. Yeah? And

Justin Donald 26:03
you didn’t talk about title companies. I think title companies are going to the wayside, probably sooner than anything, which is great. Yeah, Blockchain, when

Garrett Gunderson 26:10
you see all the title fees, always, Phil Redick, I’m always super noise. Always bothered. It’s,

Justin Donald 26:15
you know, title insurance, to me, is a total joke. It’s a total rip off. And the fact that we’re not more progressive in this sort of area, something as simple as deeds, who really owns it and have it in some sort of centralized database, I

Garrett Gunderson 26:35
just like the thought of all the busy work getting eliminated. So you could just, we could have conversations, we could hang out. We’re not, you know, I like

Justin Donald 26:41
that. I’m all for that. Anything that enhances lifestyle,

Garrett Gunderson 26:45
art’s gonna be gonna be good, but so important, because when you have three people in a podcast instead of two, one can leave in the middle of it, and yeah, and get a frosty, frosty bourbon glass. I like that tree mold, by the way. Yeah, this you just, you just kill it with whiskey. Way different. That’s what, when, when we’ve broken here before, yeah, this is, this is actually a gift from one of our banks.

Justin Donald 27:08
I love it. I’ll just show this off real quick, spray advertising.

Brad Weimert 27:12
When Garrett got in, he was like, Yeah, you know, I was at a wine tasting with Justin last night, but he was spitting out the wine because he’s got this mold issue. And I was like, I have a mold issue too, and I just think that bourbon makes it feel better. Well,

Justin Donald 27:24
I’m on a very strict protocol, as we’ve Well, I guess we both discussed for, I mean, for a year on, a lot of it, but it’ll be four months on, you know, the whole comprehensive plan, maybe four and a half or five months. And he’s made, you know, they worried about his pickleball game, yeah. Well, it’s slowing me down. Pickle, Dickel, slowing me down. I

Unknown Speaker 27:42
probably need to get on that plan. I will at some point. I think

Justin Donald 27:44
it’ll be helpful. Yeah, but it is crazy. It’s, I mean, anything that can cause any sort of inflammation. You know, it’s just out the window. So, alcohol, added sugar, gluten, dairy, corn products, rice products,

Garrett Gunderson 27:58
yep. Okay, fine. So let’s talk health on that front, then there is a question, similar to when you talk about the financial balances of I want to maintain my lifestyle, and do I get aggressive to make more money, or do I pull it back so that I can live the lifestyle I want to live? Look, there’s no question that if you want to Matt, if you want to live the longest possible days, you can cut out tons of stuff, yeah. And how does that impact your quality of life? For me? So I got, I got diagnosed with kidney disease in 2023, and it was pretty bad. So I basically went, like, Alright, whatever I got to do. My blood pressure is 192 it’s like, gotta figure this out. And it’s actually been simple, because once I got over sugar, like, part of my problem was not eating frequently enough, because I thought intermittent fasting was the best thing. And for some people it is. For other people, it creates cortisol issues. It creates, you know, other issues. So I just ate as soon as I got up, and then I just had certain approved foods I could have. And so I just started saying, All right, now that I know what I’m eating, it was, it’s actually been really nice. And then now that my Health’s a lot better, I can introduce like, I could just go have a meal and it’s no big deal. I take milk thistle and NEMA base, if it’s a mill, is not ideal, and it doesn’t really impact me. And, you know, I can look at my blood work, because your blood pretty much tells the truth about what’s going on with your health. But before, what would happen is I didn’t have enough of a plan, so I would get busy, and then I would get hungry, and then I make bad choices, especially later in the day. Now I don’t have that hunger at night, so I don’t have any bad choices that are tempting me. I could be in a hotel room with all the candies. Doesn’t bother me at all years in the years past, because I wouldn’t eat enough during the day, or, yeah, whatever. I’d be like, Screw it. I’d eat the M M’s, and I feel bad about it, because I know it’s not good for me. So if you know, I if we’re going out to eat, like when we went out last night, it was like everything on that list was pretty much approved. I just get out of dessert and felt completely fine. Don’t feel like it impacts my lifestyle. You know, now I have a house manager that makes a lot of my meals, so she’s making it tastier because I just avoid salt and I avoid any. Inflammation, inflammatory thing. So something like sweet potatoes instead of rice or, you know, it’s meat and vegetables. So for me, it’s been really nice. But if I I wouldn’t have thought that, yeah, until I was on the plan that was at TED in Vancouver last week, which I’ve been wanting to go to forever. How was it? It’s, it’s pretty disturbingly left leaning, and it’s like coming, but like, you know, we’re in a weird world. And so it just, it’s gone into this sort of, like, aggressive, far, far edge. And I feel the same edge on both sides. Absolutely. This isn’t about left, right? It’s like, both sides, on the far edges. It’s, it’s scary, yeah. And so there’s a little bit of that. And amazing, amazing, amazing people. And like, we’ve all seen TED Talks that you watch them, you’re like, What the actual fuck like? I’m I’m so glad that there are people that are doing what you’re doing and focus on this. But John Mackey was speaking, and one of the things that he said at one point was, once you, I don’t know if you said it there or I heard it through contacts. But he said, it’s interesting, because people feel like eating these foods are going to pull away from the rest of their life, but once you condition yourself to eat foods that are actually good for you, you don’t want the other thing, right? Yeah, like that pizza once in the last year. And I thought, Oh, this is gonna be a big treat. I’ve got all my old high school buddies up at the cabin, and I was like, gross. It just was gross. Like, it was weird. I was like, I was surprised. And then didn’t feel good. Your body, you know, immediately inflamed, yeah, like, I went to pull my rings off. My fingers are swollen. Not worth it,

Justin Donald 31:32
well, and you don’t notice that until you do an elimination diet, get it out of your system. Then when it’s been gone for a while, you reintroduce it, just like, inflamed the whole time, right before feels it. Now you actually feel how, you know, the impact that it actually has, which is pretty fascinating. Yeah,

Garrett Gunderson 31:46
and you to eat really healthy in America, is harder. It is hard. Yep, it is harder. It’s just, you know, everything’s so processed. There’s so many things added to it. And so when I look at people that are struggling with that, I feel for them. Because, you know, if you don’t have a lot of wealth, it’s even harder,

Justin Donald 32:01
or the education. You have to have the education and the money to do it right, right? So those are two hurdles.

Garrett Gunderson 32:06
Yeah, when I was young, I didn’t even know the difference, right? Like, I remember, I already did. I started in the financial business, and people take you out to eat all the time to court you. And like, I’m eating creme brulee for the first time, and I’m just all of a sudden, I’m just gaining weight. You know, what’s going on? I was like, I was like, Maybe you should go to the gym. And I was like, what? I had a friend from Indiana. And I was, I think I know this friend, you do. And I was, I was like, 22 and at this point, I’m on my health journey already, and I’m dialed, pretty dialed for what I thought was good at the time, right? Yeah. But I was at his house one night, and we’re hanging out, and I was like, Do you have any, like, vegetables? And he’s like, yeah. And he goes, he goes to his fridge, and he comes back, and he had heated up some tater tots. And those were the vegetables that I was getting. Tater tots, yeah? But, like, legit, he thought that was, like, a vegetable. He was like, This is good. It’s a potato, yeah, a deep fried potatoes, yeah, for you, yeah, that’s probably not actually potato anyway. I mean, there’s part potato in there, but Right, yeah, it just changes as, uh, your palate changes, for sure. It’s like, when I first got married, my wife was just, I was like, she just ate five of the most basic foods, you know, and then I started taking her, like, to nice places, no luxury once enjoyed, kind of becomes in the cell. Oh, yeah, yeah, right, the truth exchange. That’s

Justin Donald 33:21
the truth. You gotta be careful. That’s lifestyle creep, right there at his finest. There

Garrett Gunderson 33:25
is also in almost all those places, not, not almost in all of those places, in nice places, there is an opportunity to be kind of a pain in the ass, but special order in exactly whatever way you want. And that can be as simple as, like, yeah, give me the steak. Don’t cook it in whatever shit you just grill it in. Don’t give me sauce. Just give me the fucking sauce that I say, and the meat’s gonna be amazing, yeah? Like, the quality of the meat is great in great places, and that’s it. So, like, once I got off salt, and then every now and I go and go go to a restaurant, tell them to hold the salt, but they can’t help themselves, right? Everything tastes so salty that it’s overwhelming. We just over salt, everything. Yeah, yeah, just table salt. So like, you just your palate changes. It was also a table salt. And then there’s like, Salt, salt, right? There’s, so my parents actually told me this. So Morton’s added iodine to their salt as a feature of salt in their youth. So when my parents were growing up. Morton’s came out, and they’re like, there’s iodine in the salt, and it’s beneficial for your health. Now, the perspective on that now is That’s fucking terrible. Yeah, right. I want to see what happens 10 years from now. We’re gonna find out cold punch. It’s the dumbest shit we’ve done, and I’m gonna be pissed that I called bunch. There’s, I hope so, tons of shit. Oh, I love it. I’ve got two in the back here. I do well, my son’s like, I watch Hebrew, and he says, you only need 11 minutes a week. And I immediately went from like, three to five minutes of time to two minutes. I’m like, sweet. I’m going with that. I don’t know if it’s true, but that just sounds better. Yeah, we’ll know something different later. There are, there are some things that are very clear. Like, you know, in the future, we’re gonna be like, What the actual fuck were we doing a bunch of our surgeries? We’re gonna be like. Were fusing discs together, like, what? Right, what? Clearly, that’s the wrong answer, right. It’s the best thing we know how to do. Now, you know, I just, I’m optimistic of the next five to 10 on the medical front, oh, like, really highly optimistic.

Brad Weimert 35:20
Insert funny advertisement here, or just check out easy pay direct. It’s epd.com forward slash, bam, and you can find out about credit card processing for your business. Lots of our guests use us for credit card processing, and this seemed like more fun than writing a scripted

Garrett Gunderson 35:39
ad. Yes, like bringing back Wolves from 10,000 years ago. Yeah? Wild, unbelievable, crazy, legit Jurassic Park. Yeah? Right, yeah. They’re like, we’re gonna bring the wooly mammoth back. I

Justin Donald 35:52
will say this is an area where I feel like there’s outsized opportunities on the investment front too, right? So getting these cutting edge companies that are doing all types of innovative things in the world of science and the world of health and the world of longevity, in the world of robotics. How do you pick them? Though, that’s tough. So I mean, I like to look at the industry leaders in any given time, and I like to kind of pick the top four or five and distribute, you know, distribute to all of them, right? And then you can see who the outliers are over time. And then if there’s a, you know, an idea with a company that’s maybe emerging that just, you know, is kind of on its own, where I feel like, you know, they could stand out in time, I might put some money in there. But again, these investments all come from my surplus income, right? It’s all about like,

Garrett Gunderson 36:37
looking for asymmetric That’s right, the situation, if you lose it all, it doesn’t change your lifestyle. Do you have a percentage allocation for that early

Justin Donald 36:45
that’s, yeah, early stage. So I really like to model after single family offices. So what billionaires do? That’s what I want to be, you know, I want to focus on that. They seem to be the best at it. So really, it’s about 1% in early stage, and it’s about four to 10% in venture which is, you know, going to be starting around series A so, you know, call it 10 or 11% you know, somewhere in that five to, you know, depending on how aggressive or not you want to be, I’m on the more aggressive side. So I’m probably sitting at 11%

Garrett Gunderson 37:13
how much of it, is it the right idea, the right team, the right processes, or just like the leader that, founder, founder always found her first like Michael Jordan, comes the bulls. The bulls are transformed immediately, right? Yeah, I’m

Justin Donald 37:26
gonna bank, I’m gonna put my money on the jockey, you know, nine out of 10 times, and then hopefully it’s the idea, you know, parlays with that, that jockey, that was

Garrett Gunderson 37:37
Michael milkens initial strategy with junk bonds. As you go, who’s the superstar at a small enough company, I get really high interest rates, but it’s not that risky, because this is a superstar. And then what happened is they became so popular that there was too many funds coming in to actually fund superstars, and that’s where you got in trouble. Interesting, yeah, because, you know it’s like back in the day of, I don’t even know if it’s around anymore, but I remember Money Magazine, the best thing you do is see what they say is the best fund, and then, just short it, the next year, because they’re getting a huge influx of money, it’s more than they can truly allocate, and now they’re buying stuff that’s not good, because they have to have bam, in their philosophy they have, I think that’s a I think that’s a huge takeaway, because that stuff is happening left and right, right now. And there are, if you listen to people that talk about kind of macro trends you look at, can the market absorb it right? And so there’s a conversation around GPUs right now and compute power, and there was a huge maybe perceived over indexing on Nvidia. So Nvidia spiked, and it’s declining and leveling out, maybe. But the hypothesis is kind of that, which is so much money race to it, that was it the right choice or not? People got excited, and they’re like, Oh yeah, dump it in. But tech changes too. Yeah, right. So we’ll see, and

Unknown Speaker 38:56
locations come

Garrett Gunderson 38:58
in ages. Yeah right. And you don’t know who’s worked, like, where’s it being trying to comes out with something, or is it onshore? Yeah? Well, I mean, yeah, the worst example is crypto, where you just had people that were literally hiring people off of, like, 1099, websites to develop something, hype it up, and there wasn’t regulation, so they were just cashing out, and then people had nothing. Well, that’s just a story. So that’s a really interesting I mean, this is an elaborate one that, like you might have thoughts on, but it’s the are crypto is a security conversation, right? IE, should they be a regulated asset class, or should people basically be able to gamble with them? And so you’ve got to divide between certain things, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, the big the big coins, and then you’ve got meme coins, yep, and meme coins are unequivocally gambling, right? Like they’re gambling, but they’re still perceived to be an investment by a bunch of people. So it should, should, should the government or somebody step in to help regulate that, to prevent idiots from thinking they’re investing in something well, who funds the government? Because they’re already strapped and not doing a good knock. Job with regulation, right? So, like, they’re already behind the times with stocks, with NASDAQ, even, and now we’re gonna say, Go regulate this other industry. Yeah, but was that was pillaged by people that were like, cool, there’s no regulation here. So it’s easier to do an initial coin offering than it is an initial public offering, and we could just skim the crap out of that thing. Yeah? Well, IPOs are flawed. You know, from the very get go with the cost, the time, the difference. You know how you have to report moving forward, like you, you are really hamstrung after you’ve sunk. You know what $40 million in and you know how would rush? I want to here’s your what’s your opinion on this? Because I think we’re probably aligned. But I just think the stock markets are relevant. Now, I think it was a brilliant idea. Initially. It’s in the interest of building the stock market was Big Ideas require capital, and so they went public to raise that capital. No big company raises public capital. It’s all private capital at all 100% the only reason they go public is for one thing to take money off the table. Yeah. So it’s absolutely a problem, because you have underwriters that have the interest of saying that it’s going to be a valuable stock, setting the price based upon their own games if they don’t like you watch. Let’s back out of that and simplify that a little bit, because, like, if you’re in that space or you’re thinking about that, you know, right away, but one of the things that frustrates me about business or heads throughout my journey is it’s hard to jump into conversations like this and hear those things and follow them. If you don’t have any of the context or the path and like the person that’s starting a company or at a million or two or three or whatever, and they’re figuring it out, you missed 18 steps to get to actually that conversation. And the historical relevance of that is that 100 years ago, when people wanted to raise money, they did so through the public, and they did an IPO so that the public could invest in the company and they could grow. And today, in the last 50 years, specifically through Silicon Valley, I think. And you could add context to this, but venture capitalists, pe firms, et cetera, will dump money in to private companies that never hit an IPO. And so all of this money, like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, get invested into private companies for ideas that aren’t even making money yet. And the media hype, yeah, Media House, and then they build and then the thought is, eventually you can go public. But the purpose of going public today isn’t to raise money, it’s that the founders that got involved in the first place can cash out. They can take the money, basically, they can sell their shares, the available shares, to the public, and pull that money back and say, Hey, I made some money. And let’s make it worse. Well, there’s only a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder, not to employees, right? And not to customers, creating a conflict of interest, yeah, of how the company runs. Well,

Justin Donald 42:42
let’s take it a little bit further, because 25 years ago, there were 10,000 listed companies here in the US. Now we’re at 4000 because it’s hard to stay listed. So now you’re at, you know, so, so you have 4000 Right? Right? At 4000 companies listed

Garrett Gunderson 42:58
when you have literally hundreds of millions of companies worldwide. So you can either go the public side of things, which is less than point 1% of the total companies out there that are investable companies, or you can actually learn be, you know, create some expertise, find some people that have expertise, if you don’t have it, and invest on the private side, where options are plentiful, you have to learn. You have to learn. And one of the challenges is, if you want to get into private, the private markets and set another way, if you want to invest in companies that haven’t gone public, you need to do it through some other vehicle. And usually that vehicle is some fund that is raising money, and they are taking money to raise it. And so Garrett, one of the things that you’ve talked about quite a bit is the problems with people that are selling mutual funds, and all of the shit fees that go into mutual funds or stocks, etc. So for somebody else to trade for you, they’re the ones making money, not you. And the same thing can be true in the private market, because these funds take two and 20 and they they their incentive is to keep investing in new things, and they’re taking that money ever they’re 2% off the top all the time, no matter what, and so on. A moving value to a customer. Venture capital is probably the quickest way to do it. Remove value from the customer, move value from the customer, because it’s all about valuation of the company, which often is, make a shit of your product, water it down, move fast and then exit it. But the other issue that, yeah, there’s so many, there’s so many issues that happen here. So this 4000 issue that you’re talking about, if you’re a small company that goes public, you run such a major risk of getting shorted to death. Yeah? So what happens is, you create artificial fear and pessimism around a small company, and you keep buying options that basically are put options, saying when that company lowers value, you get that the money goes to you, because this is the entire crappy illusion that’s not real. Hey, $1.5 trillion was lost from the market today. Not true, right? It was transferred, right? That money didn’t evaporate. It went into someone else’s hand, right? Yeah. But people just go, oh, the market’s down. And they just accept that as the truth, right? And so I have a really close friend, they sold their business to a public company, small public company. They got shorted to death. So when they sold the stock was worth like $3.50 it’s now worth, like, three cents. Oh, geez. So this company they built, and they should have had $20 million they took off the table. They made a million bucks on the whole transaction. That’s because of that company being public. So you have, like, with mergers and acquisition, like, think about it, the sharks, all of those statements are true and real, and so that’s part of the reason you see 10,000 down to 4000 obviously, it’s arduous, and there’s all these other rules, but the small companies are just baked. So let’s go. Let’s go tactical on this. So Justin, you spend basically now, now you spend a shitload of money so that other people on your team audit deals and figure out what’s good and what’s not. Yeah, how do you find the private vehicles that that you can invest in to get into the private companies that are exciting in those spaces. Well,

Justin Donald 46:05
it’s all relationship based. You got to find the right people. You got to build the relationship. You have a reach and reputation. Yeah, they and they have to want you in it, because they don’t need your money, right? They can find the money. So you’re

Garrett Gunderson 46:18
bringing them ease, you’re bringing them the community. You’re bringing them, yeah, there’s advantages. That’s right,

Justin Donald 46:22
that’s right. So they’re looking for smart money, and they’re looking for relationships, and they’re looking for people that can actually add, you know, benefit beyond just the dollars. But this gets into the question of top quartile, bottom quartile. So, you know, if we’re talking about, you know, the public side, you know, let’s look at mutual funds and, you know, ETFs here, your top quartiles at like, you know, 9.5% your bottom quartiles at like, 7.5% so you got about a 2% Delta there. 84% of

Unknown Speaker 46:50
the return in the market goes to 10% of the investors.

Brad Weimert 46:53
What the fuck are you talking about? Can

Justin Donald 46:54
you break that down? So your best performing mutual funds, yes, are gonna perform, you know, really about 9.5% and then your worst performing ones are going to perform at about a seven, 7.5% so you got about a 2% Delta there in that between good and bad managers, mutual for mutual funds got it. So if you go over on the private side, let’s just take private equity, which is going to be, you know, later, later stage, your your bottom quartile is like 4.3% your top quartile is 25% so you’re literally at a 20% plus delta. It’s

Garrett Gunderson 47:31
a more inefficient market. So, yeah, so is that another way mutual funds, it doesn’t really matter. You’re gonna get a decent return. You’re gonna get a more stable return. If I put money in mutual funds, which I don’t, yeah, I just go index fund. Index if you’re going to do it, if you’re going index five, you better index the mutual, because they fund with, like, a fiduciary, yeah, might be 2% right? Index Fund might be, like, three basis points, right? If you look at that over, you know, 10 year period of time, it’s a difference of getting $1,000,000.02 100,000 return. That’s the difference. People think, oh, it’s only a few percent. No, it’s compounded in the cost. It’s algorithmic. So mutual funds, the delta is only 2% between the good and the bad ones, the good and bad performing mutual funds. All you need to pay attention to in mutual funds are fees, basically, because even if they’re performing poorly, if they’re taking 2% or they’re taking, you know, 50 basis points, point 5% huge difference. Private money. If you’re looking at investing in a venture capital firm or a private office or a PE company, they could, they could return 4% of they could return 25 so there it makes a lot more sense to figure out 10s of millions of dollars or hundreds of 1000s of dollars. Yeah, that’s, that’s the very it’s all about having

Justin Donald 48:43
the relationships, knowing the right people. And by the way, it’s even more extreme on the venture side. So the earlier stage you go, the bigger the gap, right? So I think, you know, bottom quartile on venture I think is like negative 7% and top quartile, I think, is 27 or 28% so it’s, it’s the biggest because they

Garrett Gunderson 49:01
intentionally kill companies in venture so this company’s not performing as much you’re done. We’re going with our pony over here. That’s crushing. So they might go we’re making 10 investments. We think that one is going to be a superstar. We think two will be okay, and we don’t care what happens the other seven, yeah, because that’s the business model. Business model. It’s not even one in 10. It’s like when credit cards first came out, they were pretty low interest, and someone at Harvard was like, You know what? If we just start charging 20 or 30% the default rate exponentially goes up, but we still make more money. And that’s similar to venture Yeah. So the question then, because I the the notion of it’s all about relationships, is super frustrating for somebody that’s new and getting started and doesn’t have a network, doesn’t have the opportunity, can’t spend, you know, a lot of money to be a part of lifestyle investor every year. So what are there any other ways that you can find those good opportunities, or audit or assess those and figure out, hey, is this a reasonable private. Investments get into.

Justin Donald 50:01
Well, I think that, you know, first off, I think getting that investor IQ down and building a foundation actually understanding what you’re doing matters, you know, before you ever put any money in anything, and we have so many free resources on that lifestyle investor, you know, the lifestyle investor.com, forward, slash roadmap, like all kinds of things that can help people out in that we’re building a due diligence AI that’s going to be able to spit out. I mean, we’re already in the beginning stages, and it’s, it’s doing well, but we want to continue to iterate on it. So I do think that the AI is going to help in that. But, you know, it’s aI still so far away from being able to say, this is a good deal, this is a bad deal. You know, here’s the real risk, here’s not so you can’t get that, but you can program these, these AIs, to diligence in a way that you want them to be diligence in. So I think that that you know exists, but I also think that you know. So the shortcut often is money, right? It’s like, how do I spend money to get access? How do I spend money for peer group or for a mastermind or for a mentor or whatever. And some people have to be willing to bite the bullet to do that if they’re in a position to do it. And if not well, then you’re relying even more, I think, on your relationship skills, that you’re offering enough value to someone else that they see value in bringing you into things. There’s a

Garrett Gunderson 51:18
couple things that I’ll just summarize here. What Justin just said was, if you have more time than money, you get the free resources and you build up the IQ. If you have more money than time, you buy your way into the relationship. So when I was 20 years old, I was in a university that we had a professor that retired as a fund manager at 53 years old. He managed $5 billion in municipal bond funds, and one day he just mentioned he wanted to get in better shape. So I was a 20 year old. I said, What do you like to do? He’s like, I like to work out and play racquetball. I’m like, great. You have a partner. And when you’re young, it’s amazing. How many people want to pay it forward. Yeah. So I just got into rooms I didn’t belong in when I was in my early 20s, because I was just willing to be inquisitive and curious and had gratitude. And people like to kind of pass that torch. Now, if you’re like, in your 40s, and you’re just starting out, it’s a little bit different game. Well, let me have to put some grit. Let me add another part to that equation. Because, yes, if you have a lot of time, you should spend it sweat equity, learning, growing, et cetera. If you have a bunch of money, then you can spend money to do it, but the gap between those two is making more money. And so we were talking about this earlier, but there is a question of, when do you try to invest money for something, and when do you make more money? And my I sort of, I am so risk averse. I’m always looking at how to protect the likely best and the likely worst. How do I, how do I play into both of those, and so I don’t go as heavy into like, Fuck it all. Let me just make a bunch of money. I’m always trying to control for it through the path. But there is something to be said for don’t worry about investing in anything, and just worry about building your core asset, which is yourself and your core business or cash flow engine, so that you have money to invest in the thing later, invest in the relationships, the exposure, etc. That’s at least. That’s been my three things that you should do before growing your money is learn to make more money. Learn how to keep more the money you make. You just get more savvy. How do you save tax? How do you save interest? How do you remove non performing investment fees? How do you design insurance properly? Then you figure, like, the whole time through, how do I grow myself? Because the more valuable you make yourself, the easier it is to build a network. Yeah, and part of that just comes down to look like, when I meet with Justin, I might not know something that could help him, but I know someone who can. So literally, he was like, oh yeah, this person that you introduced me to. So I’m always looking to make connections. And it’s not I don’t care about getting paid on any of that. It’s just, if I could be more valuable the relationship. And then you worry about when you’ve got those three things, and it’s never, you never stop growing yourself. But then you go, all right now that I’ve learned how to have a little financial intelligence, I’ve learned how to sell, communicate market. Now it’s, how do I grow my money? Yeah, you know. And too many people want to just go and get bitcoin at 200 and then they’re mad that they need but like, the people I knew that bought at 200 were nerds, dude. They were like, like, tech geeks also could have been very wrong speculative, right? But it was, like, part of their DNA to research it and to want to do, like, when I was I was gonna buy at 300 and they wanted me to meet him at a McDonald’s parking lot. I’m like, I’m good, yeah, I’m out. Like, that wasn’t for me. So we just have to recognize, like, it’s when people are fantasizing about being in the that club of being able to invest. They’re not thinking about actions they could take to get themselves there, and they look at someone who’s already there. But when did you start

Justin Donald 54:37
investing? Well, I started investing just in the stock market, not knowing anything that I know today, you know, listening to the council that I had around me, you know, when I was got Dean, right? Yeah? So,

Garrett Gunderson 54:47
like, it’s it people are looking where you’re at now, and they, they don’t look at all the steps it took to get to this point, right? Yeah, you know. Well, I have a, I’ve said this a bunch times, but like, I have a number of friends that are 10 years older than me. Yeah, and in a completely different financial situation, and I have to consistently, consistently remind myself, it’s not my job to behave like these people, how they’re living right now. It’s to learn how they behaved when they were where I am right now. Yeah, and it’s such a it’s such a relevant thing, because you look at people that are crushing it, and then you try to model what they’re doing in their life now, and it’s like, no, no, they’re so far beyond that, right? They’ve got stuff on autopilot so they can go out and be a jackass. I know people that all of us know that tried to invest with the big boys that were using their like, 1% or, you know, four to 10% money with their core money. Yeah, right. And it destroyed them, right? Because I’m like, Whoa, you’re you’re just you’re over the wrong phase, and you’re trying to do things. It’s like going to the gym and never lifting, and seeing someone lift heavy weights and think you’re going to lift those heavy weights, there’s steps to get to those weights, and it takes strength over time. That’s a great analogy. One of the things that I like about your stuff in general, Garrett, is that you have these concrete frameworks and very convicted beliefs around the frameworks. But those, those basic structures that are like, No, these are the building blocks and systems are, I think, even if the building blocks and systems are flawed in some capacity, having a framework and structure to follow that is flawed is far more important than having no framework at all. Biggest flaw with most people’s framework is that they think passive incomes from being passive not active. You The more active you are up front, the more passive your income can become. But people want to pass it from the beginning, therefore they chase risky investments and highest return like, like, let’s just think about it, just from a supply and demand standpoint, why would I be able to just go put money into something right now that would yield me? Like, I meet people that are like, Dude, I found this guy’s doing options. He’ll make me 10% a month. I’m like, fantasy never gonna happen. I can promise you, you’re gonna lose 100% of it. And I’m like, let me just show you, know, pull out a calculator on my phone. I’m like, let me put 10% a month in for 30 years. Tell me the smallest number you would put into this and then I’m like, tell me what this number is on the calculator. You can’t read it because it’s not a real number. It’s more than the money supply. I’m like, it’s just we want to believe the fantasy of the story more than we want to believe the work that goes into sustainability. And I think one of the questions for that is, anytime you get one of those traditionally outsized return numbers, the question is, for how long? Yeah. I mean, like, and almost always when somebody gives you a number like that, you can, you can, if you are patient. And one of, one of the things that Justin, I have talked about quite a few times, is if somebody, and I think I probably have adopted this from you, is when somebody puts pressure on you, on a deal, I’m out, like, if you have an urgent deadline, I’m out. I just, I’m out. Okay? I like that because it’s like, you don’t want to be rushed. No, no, I will not be rushed, right? I will not be rushed. I’m also, like, if they can’t explain what they’re doing in a paragraph or less, it’s odd. And so that’s one of the things that I’ve gotten from you, is, I think actually, when you were on the last time we recorded on beyond a million, you said, if you can’t break down your investment strategy in one page. Yeah, I’m out. That’s and that’s like, I think I learned that from just hearing Warren Buffett talk, and he made one of his biggest investments off a one page document. And he was, it was in the 90s where everybody’s bringing him internet deals and Internet stocks aren’t even around anymore. Back then, there was a thing called an Internet stock, and they’re like, this guy’s an idiot. He’s missing the boat, but he’s like, No, it can’t be described in a way that makes sense. So if I don’t get it right, I can’t invest. It’s or if I’m under

Justin Donald 58:27
duress, or if you are peppering me, if you are harassing me to get this done, how can I make a decision that’s a non emotional decision,

Garrett Gunderson 58:37
you know, like, risk is in the investor, not the investment. There’s just risky investors out there. Some people are fantastic at real estate, other people, they should never do anything with it. You know, some people are good at business. Other people aren’t well. Let me say that another way too, because some people are fantastic in real estate and have a very high risk profile, and some people are fantastic in real estate and they have no risk profile or very low risk profile. And they can both be great, but if you aren’t aligned with one of the other, and you don’t understand that you’re getting into high leverage, risky real estate proposition, then you probably shouldn’t do it like I have found myself in a situation. I’ve found myself in all those buckets right where you have somebody that has a good track record in real estate, but the way that they operate is misaligned with how I want to operate. And if you can see that on the front end, and you can be patient enough to understand that, then you can pull away from it and say, I’m not going to get involved. The cabin that you came to. I knew it was a good investment, because I know the area right. I’d been researching areas around there for, like, the ideal cabin for 10 years. I got, you know, the reason I bought the second one, it wasn’t for sale. We just started hosting barbecues at my place and asking, Hey, do you know anyone that’s gonna sell? And he’s like, Well, in three years, I’m like, what if I bought it now, and they rent it even, right? Like it wasn’t even on the market. And so it’s Mongolian plumbing. So this is what Mongolian plumbing is. The Mongols go to Russia, they’re fighting a war, and they see toilets that you could flush, and they’re like. Damn, this is amazing. So they still the toilets. Bring them home. They didn’t understand the plumbing, and that’s how a lot of investors are. They don’t understand all the unseen factors that make it sustainable. I love that guy. Well, I want to, I want to highlight something else, and I’ll, uh, now I’m just like, fluffing both of you. But like, legit, legit. There are great things that I’ve gotten from knowing both you from a financial perspective. Great things from a relationship perspective, of course. But I was hanging out with Justin years ago, and

we were talking about the I can’t remember if it was specific to this deal or not, but I’m driving around in COVID, beginning of COVID, and I see this empty lot for sale, like fucking downtown Austin, like downtown, downtown, and it’s quote unquote overpriced, and I see it and I’m like, I need that. I buy it. So I buy it right away. The neighboring lot, he had segmented a giant lot, and he had segmented and sold half of it, and there was somebody in between. It doesn’t really matter. But the other lot, quote unquote, wasn’t for sale. And Justin said, Well, do you have a relationship with Him? And actually, it wasn’t this deal. You told me this years earlier, but he said, You need to build a relationship with this person. And I learned it because I, actually I did this exercise with another person that didn’t go anywhere with, and it was like this 85 year old guy I was trying to buy his building. And so Justin was like, we’ll build a relationship with him. So I would go in and hang out with this guy. That one went nowhere, but I wanted this lot next to mine, so I spent two and a half years drinking shitty beer and whiskey with a neighbor, and ultimately bought his lot. And it took a whole bunch of bizarre, you know, conversation nuance, but it was relationship, and he wanted it to go to somebody that he liked, respected, trusted, and it took that time to build the relationship and and there is the adage of, like, everything’s for sale at the right price, but it’s everything’s for sale with the right person also, right? It’s not just the right price, it’s the right terms, and those terms include the relationship that you have,

yeah, and I wouldn’t have got the house that we’re in now if it wasn’t for that, because my wife’s best friend is in our neighborhood, and knew the person selling the home, and it’s a nice Inn. And I was like, and when we were the first ones to walk through the home, because we literally decided the night before, we’re gonna sell other house, and this one came up, so we immediately went and had a swimming pool in it, and so my kids had a swimming shirt. So I’m like, I’m using my comedy charm. I’m going hard, but I like, it was during a time where everything was going for more than was being asked, and an investor offered them cash, and I was gonna finance, but it was because of my wife’s friend being like, do you really want this go to an investor in this neighborhood, or do you rather go to a family? Oh, damn, I know the family. And so we ended up, and that made the day of the difference, right? So that’s wild. That’s wild because usually cash just takes it, and I just mine. I’ve definitely, like, when I, when we walked and saw you, I was like, All right, I’m gonna turn on all the charm in the world. Like, first off, she, she didn’t have kids, so my kids were stressing her out. So, I mean, it was like, somewhere, if I might get the kids, get them away from her, and I’m just gonna talk to her, you know? And, yeah, we built a relationship. She was the owner and realtor, which helped. So this is, this is like a fundamental sales and marketing tenant, which is, know your audience, right? And so, like, this applies to so many things in life, but this is a really good thing when you’re going into any negotiation if you don’t understand the person that you’re trying to negotiate with, and negotiates in this context, sounds kind of like a dirty word, but like, if you don’t understand the motives and desires of that person, how could you possibly help them get what they want?

Justin Donald 1:03:26
And so values, the values speak volumes to like, what, what do they ultimately want? Like, you know, well, that’s

Garrett Gunderson 1:03:31
why I wanted to unwind of life negotiation, because the word negotiation is, can be dirty, but like, really, if you look at it the other way, which is what you just said, which is how I look at it, there’s the antagonistic No, look, there’s no way for me to create a win, win, win if I don’t know what your win is, yep, right? And so I can’t do that until I know who you are, what you’re about, what your values are and what matters to you. And I might, by the way, find out that your values are so fucked up off of mine that there’s no win for us, right? And then, okay, and it’s good to know that you’re not just all in cash. You bought some land. Well, I have a bunch of land.

Justin Donald 1:04:07
Well, one thing about you, Brad is you, you generate your thesis. You do a lot of, you know, diligence, you do a lot of market research, and you, you develop a thesis on what you think it’s going to be. And then you go, you know, two feet in, and that has served you really well. I’ve seen it over and over and over and so, yeah, you might be sitting in cash more than you want, but I also know that you’re good at deploying that cash when you finally find what it is that just really you know, your intuition tells you this is

Garrett Gunderson 1:04:36
people that wait for the deal and find it and stay patient. There was an article written in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. It was, I love the title. It’s called predatory investing. And he was talking about Ted Turner, and how Ted would sit on piles of cash and then buy when everything was in distress. Yeah, and would even reacquire businesses he sold, because then they would get into trouble. They called it, but it was like. The returns he was getting versus everybody else, because he was willing to be patient and wait for the right deal you ever served him. So two things, one, you have a ton of leverage when you’re in cash, right? So sitting in cash, being like you said, you you were, you played it well to be able to buy something when somebody else came in in cash, I bought both my cabins for cash and I didn’t. I had a lower offer, 50,000 less than the person that they didn’t give the captain to, yeah, so it was only closing five days, yeah. So the other side of that that I want to highlight is just like the the notion of predatory investing. I think that’s a great headline, right? And catchy, and whatever, blah, blah, blah, but like, the, the fact of the matter is, it would just be stupid to buy it at the top of the market, when you have a better macro approach and you can see it, it is just smarter to sit on it and wait. And in no way if you do it right, in no way is it does it have to be a win lose in the situation when the market’s down and somebody has pressure and needs to sell, you can actually buy over market in that situation where they get a better win than they possibly might have lost the whole thing, and you get a better deal because you bought it at that time. The worst case scenario with real estate is it goes to the bank, yeah, because that’s going to be an REO death trap that takes forever, and if they get something versus nothing, well, but that can go into the predatory consideration. What I was getting at was like, Yes, and you can, at the same time, give offer them more, yeah, and you can still create a win where, like, they’re getting more than anybody will offer them right now, and they don’t go and they get out of their stress, and they get out of their stress, and they get a fucking killer deal. And you got a killer deal because of the timing right. And I think that that’s a beautiful reality, if you have the thought process to do it.

Justin Donald 1:06:40
And now could be a great time for that. With interest rates high, asset values are lower. There’s less transactions taking place. There’s a lot more negotiating ability, 100% and a lot of people are getting squeezed right now. You know, you may not read about it, but I know tons of people that are like financially pinched. They they owned assets. Now their assets own them. They did it with aggressive leverage. Now they can’t cash flow it, and not just like big commercial properties. I mean, we’re talking just like too many private residences, or too many, you know, whatever they think about

Garrett Gunderson 1:07:13
like that, every wealth category too. Yes, you can have somebody that has one house. You can have somebody has 10 but at every category, they could have just been over leveraged, or their lifestyle could have spun out of control, or the business could have been debt, whatever. There are tons of these circumstances. I know people that bought in Puerto Rico after one of the major hurricanes, and now, I mean, they bought properties for two and a half million that are worth 10 Yeah, you know, because everybody’s like, I don’t want to touch that, but that’s the time that they’re, like, desperate and they want help, and if you can help them well, and you said something that I think is important. And I don’t remember the words, but basically terms is what I heard, yeah, and that is right now we’re in a place because interest rates are high that so many things you can suggest, owner financing. You can suggest, instead of me going out to a bank and getting a loan, the person that owns the property might be willing to just work out a deal where I just pay them for a while, and I will pay them less than if I mortgage it through a bank for a long for some period of time, and they will be happy with it, and it’s non recourse on you, and it doesn’t show up on your credit

Justin Donald 1:08:12
Yeah, or credit rating, yeah, yeah. It’s it’s powerful. The higher, the higher the interest rate, the more likely you will see seller finance. I mean, that is one of the big wins of this time, this season that we’re in, as you will see, way more seller finance. I’ve done a bunch of it. You

Garrett Gunderson 1:08:26
got people that bought pre 2023, I mean, there’s some amazing interest rates on there. Dude, I had a, I’m not going to do this because it’s still egregiously priced, but I had a, I just looked at a property on Lake Austin. And Lake Austin is unique because there are 240 homes in Lake Austin, limited. 240 really limited. And you’ve got all this big money coming in for all the tech companies, etc, etc, right? And 240 historically, you might see, and boat slips are even less than that, way less less than So boat slips are now you cannot put them in, yeah. So by that grandfather and you have to have grandfathered in. So boat slips are super valuable. People will buy boat slips for a million, $3 million for a fucking boat slip. Yeah, so I look at this lot, and it’s like, the trick with Lake Austin is it’s the closest lake. It’s a fucking river, but it’s the closest Lake to Austin, and the closest area is called Terrytown, and it’s legitimately eight minutes from downtown. So you can have a lake house where you’re actually still living in the community. Now the next chunk up is like 1520 minutes from downtown. Now, if you go to the other side of the lake, it’s 2530 minutes from downtown. And then you go up a little further, and it’s 3540 minutes now you could say those are all nominal. They’re not really when you think about lifestyle, eight minutes, you can be there, in and out in the same day. 25 now we’re like, yeah, you can be in and out same day. 3540 you’re looking kind of like a weekend thing. Maybe it depends on your lifestyle, right? But I look at this house and somebody bought it. It two years sorry, not house. It’s an empty lot in Terrytown. So this is, like, the most desirable place you could possibly be on Lake Austin, eight minutes from downtown, at tops. Tops, they bought the lot two years ago for 13 million, and they bought it cash. Here’s the thing, and this is why you need to know your buyer, know your know your seller, know your audience, right? Bought it for 13 million, but they bought a cash now that tells me things, right? They also don’t live here. They wanted to develop the property. They went through all this shit to do it, blah, blah, blah. Now it’s listed for 11 so they’re just trying to get rid of it. So you look at these little signs, and you say, Okay, well, there’s some leverage here. And then you think, okay, they’re trying to get rid of it. What do they need it for? And that’s a question I don’t know, right? Will they finance? Will they not finance? Now, I still think that that property in this current market, 11 million, is out of control. For what it’s worth, however, undeveloped, undeveloped, vacant, oh, it’s also limestone, not a flat lot. You have to, like do things, but, and if you actually want to make money on this thing, you really need to build it out to the fullest. You go, highest and best use, right? Highest and best use on this thing is probably building like a 25 $30 million place. So now you’re in just a different category of what you’re building, right? But the and so I’m not, not my play right now, not my play right now. But you look at these things and you think, Okay, if you just know the extra pieces of the person to negotiate the deal, the deal totally changes. Yeah,

Justin Donald 1:11:27
great points. What I, I feel like that’s a great ending point. Yeah, know the person, know, get to know their situation. And you know, it gives you some, you know, just some eyesight into things that you otherwise maybe would have known that another buyer wouldn’t know. I love that, and I hope at some point you buy that property on the lake. I will. It’s probably not that one right now, but yeah, unless you want to buddy up on it, you know that one’s tough. I don’t just, I mean, I would rather take a nice home already done, already has the boat slip. Just it’s legit.

Garrett Gunderson 1:12:01
What I told her, I was talking to the seller where they’re built, yeah? The realtor, and I’ll see. I don’t need a

Justin Donald 1:12:05
fucking product right now, because whatever you think you’re gonna pay for building, yeah? And how have you lived? Gonna be longer? Yeah? The whole thing, this is fun. Boy, this is awesome. Yeah, we can do it. Thanks for coming into town, Garrett, thanks for having me.

Garrett Gunderson 1:12:16
Thanks for hosting. Always good to see you. Cool. Sweet. All

Brad Weimert 1:12:21
right, that’s a wrap for this episode. I’m supposed to tell you that you should subscribe to the show and you should leave a review. I really want you to leave a review, though, because it makes, like, a radical difference in the algorithm and getting other people to be able to see the show. So can you please go leave a review? It’ll take you, like, 30 seconds. Also, if you want more episodes that are amazing, you can check out the full length video versions at beyond a million.com, or youtube.com. Forward slash at beyond a million. You won’t regret it.