Garrett J. White: How I Rebuilt My Life After Losing It All | E151
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I was raised in Mormonism. My mom was like very disciplined. Here's the checklist to heaven. If you and I are in family and we don't both make it, we break the family chain, the whole family is fucked. My uncle, he was a bodybuilder. He was an aggressive dude. I'm six years old and he pulled me into a bathroom, punched me in the head, told me I would kill you if you tell anyone. And this shit went on for two years. I started trail running, ultra running. I'd been doing Ironman's

And they got an ultra running and it was an ultra running, running 10, 15 miles in the middle of the trails and mountains. And this voice became this inspiration. Everything we did with Wake Up Warrior transformed my life. But at that time I had nothing, no money, an affair, addiction, just nothing. I had nothing. All I had was run.

And this voice at that time started guiding me to see things about myself. And the first thing he did was truth. This has been one of the best shows I've ever done. We went to a place where I've never gone before in the 150 podcasts that I've done. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life.

My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives. My guest today is the incredible Garrett J. White. Garrett is a business, marriage, and family coach who is best known for his Wake Up Warrior movement. In the last 12 years, Garrett has coached more than 65,000 people

from 27 countries with a mission for them to become their full and authentic selves for personal development. Garrett has an incredible story about redemption, resilience, and a commitment to the truth as he rebuilt his life after losing his business and family by embracing transparency and authenticity. Garrett, thanks for being here. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Randall, I'm honored to be on this show. You've got a great lineup. Excited to be part of that with you. Thanks for being here. You got it. I always start my show with parents.

Our parents helped influence and shape our future. You grew up in Washington, California. Your mom was passive and your dad grew up in a military family. Tell us how your parents influenced your future and what they were like. So my dad was the youngest of five kids and he was the one child that wasn't raised in military. So he did the exact opposite. My grandfather was

Colonel in the Air Force, my uncles all deployed, all of them active. And then my dad was the last one. My father, my grandfather retired. He said, listen, we've given enough blood from our family to this country.

You're going to do something different. So my dad actually became the opposite of my grandfather and my uncles and became very soft. And you would think he came from an aggressive background that he chose the exact opposite. My mother, on the other hand, became the aggressive alpha in our house. And she came from the opposite, which was same thing, very soft family. And she chose the opposite path. So somehow both of them flopped roles. You would think that my mother was raised in a military family and my father was raised with...

people that just sat and quietly, peacefully sat and enjoyed life. It was a complete opposite though. So my parents switched roles and my dad became like a person that wasn't really involved in our lives. We, I don't have a lot of memories of my dad. My dad was just very quiet and we didn't make him much money. And my dad was always gone working, but not making much money working. And my mom was constantly trying to figure out how do I take care of these five children with almost no money and

So cornbread and powdered milk and that game, my mom's only game for us was just discipline. She was raised Catholic, very devout. Then she became Mormon, even more devout. And then her role in her life was my job is to get these kids back to God, back to heaven. And so all of it came through rigid discipline. That's why when people meet my parents, they're like, your mom's intense. She's intense as hell. I was like, yeah, she's fucking real intense. Like so intense from the time I was younger and I was the oldest.

What did your dad do for a living? And I want you to talk about your relationship. A lot of people I know, and I think this is more of a male-male thing than a female-male thing in terms of your parents. You had a rocky relationship at some point called the Antichrist. At some point, you punched your dad in the face. Yeah, so my dad and I, so I was raised in Mormonism, and my dad was a passive guy in the faith. My mom was, like, very disciplined. Like,

checklist. Here's the checklist to heaven. My job is to get all of us back to heaven. And if we don't in Mormonism, the frame is really intense because everything for them is eternal in nature, which means the belief system of the frame is if you and I are in family and we don't both make it, we break the family chain and the whole family is fucked.

So everything in the frame of Mormonism is super fierce with do what's right, do what's right, do what's right, long-ass checklist, do these things, and then you earn the right and the glory and the grace of God. So my mom, with that rigid brain, raised me that way in 2009 after we'd lost our banking firms, and I was in the darkest place I'd ever been.

I started trail running, ultra running. I'd been doing Ironmans. Right. And then got into ultra running. And it was in ultra running, running 10, 15 miles in the middle of the trails and the mountains. I started hearing this voice for the first time in my life talking to me. I didn't know if it was myself. I didn't know what it was. And this voice became this inspiration. Everything we did with Wake Up Warrior transformed my life. But at that time, I had nothing. No money, an affair, addiction, just nothing. I had nothing. All I had was running.

And this voice at that time started guiding me to see things about myself. And the first thing it did was truth. Like the only thing I had to offer the world was truth. I had nothing else. I didn't have any money. All my teams are gone. All my companies are gone. All my money's gone. I fucked on a money, ton of people. My wife doesn't want to, doesn't trust me. She's pregnant with our second daughter. My affair is exposed. My, my life is exposed. So I have nothing to offer anyone. And this voice in me said, the only thing we can do is,

is offer the truth. And we're going to start from that place. And so long before social media was cool to tell your darkness, I started speaking it. And part of that truth was leaving the Mormon church. So let's, let's talk about that. I mean, I want to go back to and really cut up what you just said in 10 different stories there. Cause a lot, a lot there to talk about. This is not a religious show, but it's very interesting to me to hear about different people's religion and

What's interesting about Mormonism, I've never heard the Mormonism term. Is that a term, Mormonism, as opposed to Jewish or Christian? Mormonism versus the Latter-day Saints. Okay. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Okay. And the short term for it is Mormons. Most of them don't like to be called Mormons, but they're Mormons. And that's what I was raised in was Mormonism. And can you explain the difference between being a Mormon versus a Christian versus a Jewish? Absolutely. Okay.

So Mormons believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ was lost, that after Christ, there was a falling away and that all the churches were arguing. This is the premise. All the churches were arguing about truth, which they still do today. Like I would consider myself a Christian now, but I wouldn't have considered myself a Christian until three years ago. I wouldn't even have considered myself a Christian when I was Mormon. I didn't have a relationship with Christ. I didn't have a relationship with God. I had a relationship with checklists of trying to be righteous and

and a superiority complex, which will make sense here in a second. So the premise is a guy named Joseph Smith came, had a vision, and God came to him and said, all the churches are wrong. I'm going to give you the whole church. And now your job is to restore the gospel of Jesus Christ to the planet. And Mormonism was born.

Now that whole premise is what I was raised in. We have the truth, the only truth, but there's also a second book. So like the Bible, there's a book called the book of Mormon. This is where Christians as a whole to the Mormons, like you can't add to the Bible. The Mormons are like, we didn't add to it. There was another book of scripture in the Americas that was based on Jesus Christ visits here and the visits in the Bible. So the whole premise of Mormonism is that the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is found only in

in the Mormon faith. So I was raised in this place of being constantly told, you're the only ones that have the truth. We are the best because God chose you were born into the Mormon church. So you did something right before you got here. Now, I didn't have any bad basis. My life did not represent, nor did my family's life that we show any fruit really, that we were superior to anything. But this was the energy that I was raised in, which I didn't understand why other Christian faiths would look at Mormons the way they did until I left the Mormon church in 2009.

And then I got to experience a whole bunch of other things. And for the first time, I could see, oh, I now see why a lot of people think they don't believe in Christ, which they do. And I also see why a lot of people have a hard problem, hard time with the Mormon frame. That's what led to the collision with my father. So I have one of our closest friends was raised in the Mormon church, met his wife in the Mormon church. They were both Mormons. And there's many behaviors that are

and somewhat unique to the Mormon church. One is you can't drink. Right. And there's no premarital sex. Right. Even though from what I understand, and I'm not trying to make a generalization, I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, that premarital sex does happen. It happens, especially with athletes. I know a lot of athletes at BYU and with that, that happens. But with our, with our friends, they woke up one day and, um,

They decided that the Mormon church is not right for them.

and they left the Mormon church, both of them together, and it caused a very big dissension, divide between their family and said, how could you do this? And it took a while to repair that relationship. Is it common for families to leave the Mormon church where they say, okay, this lifestyle isn't for me, and as I get to be an adult, I thought, okay, well, maybe I do want to drink. I do want to have premarital sex. I do want to do other behaviors. A hundred percent. You

You're going to send like, so Mormon faith operates like the Jewish faith. So Jews, like I'm in a neighbor, neighbor moved into in golden beach is Jewish, right? So am I answer Jewish? And everyone that I know is Jewish, they have a very tight connection inside of the faith. It's not that they only do business with Jewish people, but most Jewish businessmen I know have a very good relationship with other Jewish businessmen. Mormons operate the same.

So there's a ton of fund managers, investment bankers. There's a ton. It's the reason why the Mormon church is worth what it's worth, $160 billion. Which many people don't know, by the way. There was this expose on the Wall Street Journal. They're very secretive. Very secretive. There's a ton of money in the Mormon church. They're the wealthiest Christian, non-Christian. I mean, the Christian world doesn't accept them as Christian. They say Jesus Christ on the label. To me, I know Mormons. They believe in Jesus Christ, even if you think they don't.

But inside that frame, like that network, business, family, relationships, everyone I did business with, all my strategic partners, most of our clients, everybody was Mormon. You keep it in. It's part of how the wealth has grown because everything's kept inside of the circle. I'm going to do a deal with you. I'm going to do a deal with you. You're Mormon. There's an automatic sense of trust. Oh, you're Mormon. I'm Mormon. Let's do business.

Oh, you're not Mormon? We might still do business. But if you were Mormon, we probably for sure would do business. So when you choose to extract yourself from that environment, it's not like being at a local community Christian church where you go to VU here in Miami and then you decide you don't want to go to VU anymore. No one knows you left because nobody really knew you were there. In a Mormon church, everything is registered.

It's like from like, you are, you are in the mix. So when you choose to extract, you're extracting yourself from the mafia. Now I'm not saying that Mormons are mafia. The energy though is very family mafia tight. So when you say you're going to leave, families will disown their children. We didn't talk to our families for five years. This led to the fight in my father's house because my dad decides when we, me and my wife decided to leave the Mormon church.

which was unheard of on any sides of our family. Now, mind you, half the people that were saying they were Mormon were doing all this shit you're not supposed to do as a Mormon. I was just following a voice. It wasn't I thought the Mormons were bad or wrong or awful. It wasn't even like, I don't want this lifestyle. I heard this voice in me that said, you're done.

So I went to my wife and I said, okay, I'm done. She's like, whew, thank goodness. Cause I was never in. I was like, okay. She's like, I thought you'd be done a long time ago. So I'm cool. She's more Buddhist. She's not even Christian. She's just kind of zenned out woman listens to God in her way. So when we leave, my dad holds a meeting at the house and he says, gather all the family. So the family outcomes. I remember my dad's not aggressive.

My dad's very passive. He did the opposite of my grandfather. So we show up to the house and all the families gathered and they have a family home evening. That's what it's called in Mormon faith. Gather the family, have a meeting, talk about God. There's a particular story in the book of Mormon that talks about a guy named Korhor.

Korahor was a guy who was trying to stir up trouble, kind of made like Saul was in the Bible, according to Christian faith in the New Testament, stirring up problems with the Christians. Saul becomes Paul. Christian faith builds on Paul. In the Book of Mormon, there's a guy named Korahor who's causing problems. So my dad decides that the lesson he wants to give that day is a story about Korahor. Now, the intention of this entire thing, my wife and I are sitting right there. My siblings are sitting there. My dad delivers this message, and he's coming right at me with heat.

Never seen my dad. My dad doesn't get physical. I was very violent, very physical. I was the opposite of my father. I was like my grandfather. So my dad starts to step up to me in the middle of this family meeting. Veins are popping out on his neck. Face is blood red. Fists are clenched. But I'm just sitting there calm. So we never fought. We sat there. My mom's holding him back. And my dad's irate. Now, I understand why. Because in Mormon tradition, the oldest son...

I've now broken the family chain and everything my parents in their spiritual frame had worked for was being shattered before their eyes. And the storyline to them is I've just crushed our opportunity as a family to be together for eternity. So it was a huge deal for my parents. So looking now back at it, I can understand why my father's way was, but he comes up to me and I said, listen, if you swing at me, this will be the worst decision you've ever made. Please stop.

And my mom's holding his arms. He's so angry. I've never seen my father's angry in my whole life. Because I'm a typically very angry person at that time of life, I kind of liked it. Because I was like, where the fuck was this guy? Like my whole young life growing up. Where was this man that was supposed to lead me? Where was the dude when I was getting fucked up after school every day in Stockton? Where was the guy that was supposed to protect me? No, you were a fat, soft, diabetic dude who fucking hid.

And now you want to get tough with me? You want to get tough with me now? After I make one of the hardest decisions that I've ever made to leave a faith in everyone I know and to be abandoned by everyone in business, all of our family, now you're going to be a tough guy? So my wife's sitting there, all my siblings are sitting there, no one can believe what's happening. They're like, what is going on? And that was last time I talked to my dad for five years. We walked out of the house, the peck of shit,

We moved to Arizona. We were living in Utah at the time. What's the number one piece of advice you would tell somebody at any age? It could be a parent listening today. It could be someone who's grown up and has a still a tough relationship with their parent. What's the number one piece of advice you would tell people? The best way to bridge my relationship with my mother or father is... Truth. Truth. And unfortunately, truth, like because a lot of people will bridge relationships with

And they'll surrender truth, meaning they won't tell the truth. What does that mean? Hey, you've been an asshole to me as a kid, or you were unfair to me, you were mean, you were cruel. I think the first thing that has to happen is you have to come to terms with the fact that your parents were your parents.

Your parents get, you had no choice. Your parents are your parents. They birthed you. They gave you a body. It's the same feel I have for my five children. I'm a steward of my children until they have the opportunity to go choose their own path and do their own life. So for me, like we, we still, to this day, I'm a love my mom and dad. Like I do that by houses, buy them cars, take care of their life, make sure they're in abundance because they can't take it themselves that way. But still, even to this day, my father and I maybe have a five minute conversation per year.

One. One. That's it. And my mother and I probably... What does that look like, that five-minute conversation? It's not much. It's like... Surface. How are you? Hi. How you doing? Bye. Great. Okay. See ya. That's it. And so people are like, well, does that make you upset? I said, no, we had the opposite experience with my wife's parents. Because my wife's parents also, when we left, because they were Mormon...

But they came back across with us over the years and they chose a relationship with us. And we had gotten to a place as parents where like, as adults, me and my wife, we were like, I'm not going to fight for a relationship where I'm constantly put in a place where I'm told I'm wrong for doing my life this way. And the thing that was interesting about it was I was like, mom, look at the fruit of my life. Get off your religious checklist for a second and look at the fruit of my life. Look at the impact I am making on the world.

Look at all the rest of our siblings, bundle them all together. All of our cousins in every direction, take everyone you fucking know. And they don't have one basket of the impact that me and my wife are making on the world. I'm not trying to say this in place to make me better. I'm willing to do shit no one else is willing to do. Of all our family, I'm the one and possibly I'm the chain breaker of poverty and scarcity and guilt and shame and obligation that you all are so trapped in.

To the point that my wife won't go to family reunions. She refuses because when we go there, it's something of a judgment. It's just judgment. I'm like, I understand. And she's not trying to. It's the world that she was raised in. So I know the question was like, how do you repair it? The truth is, it's not broken, but it's not awesome. I'm not upset.

At the same time, I'm not going to put myself, and I've watched so many people, because it's family, they're like, well, my job is to put myself back into a relationship with these people. The challenge is if my vibration is here and my family is down here, then that means for me to come into their space, I have to suffer.

That is a deliberate choice to bring myself back into this. And so many families are spending time. I'm sitting in California right before Thanksgiving. I had to go to the DMV to get my driver's license issue. Oh my God, it's a nightmare. They closed down another one. It was like 600 people waiting in line. So I'm sitting there talking to people and I'm listening to people. It's right before Thanksgiving. People just getting on the phone, arguing with other family members. It's like, there's a tradition. We have to go be with people because we were born with people. We still have family, tons of family. There's just our family of choice.

Part of that is my wife's family. They choose to be part of our lives. My mother-in-law flies to us every other month for the past 10 years. My mother's come to us once in 10 years. I'm like, babe, I'm raising five children. I'm running three companies. I don't have time to fly to the middle of nowhere and go hang out in this energy that the whole time all I can think about is when are we leaving from this place?

Which is hard because people want to be connected to their family. But the message I constantly have is you have two families. You have the family you were blood-borne to, and you have the family you choose. There's a reason, like, even getting divorced. It's like, okay, so you made a decision. But if you're honest with yourself, why are you going to the family reunion? Guilt, obligation, feel like you have to, unless you don't. And can you repair that? Yes. Do I feel like there's a season coming where I'll repair that? I think so. I feel it. Is it this year? No.

Could it be next year? Could my parents pass before that happens? Could. And people hear that from me, and they're like, that's cold. I was like, I'm grateful to my parents for who they built me to be. I'm grateful for that. At the same time, as a 48-year-old man living my life now, I don't choose to put myself in environments where the environment itself is not conducive to me, my wife, or my children. So many people I know who run into drug addiction and have...

emotional problems later was sexually molested as a kid you were sexually molested for six years by your uncle can you tell us when that started how you started how that can you tell us if you're comfortable with some of the details because I I think a lot of the details that people want to know well what exactly does that mean I know it's there's a spectrum better than how did that affect you so my uncle lived three houses down from us

He was a bodybuilder. He was an aggressive dude. He was the opposite of my dad. Mom's side or dad's side? My dad's side. And he was, he's passed away now. Pancreatic cancer. Died years ago. But he was like this masculine figure. And his boys were all very soft.

I was very aggressive with a soft father. So I was naturally drawn to the masculine energy that he demonstrated. He was big, he was thick, he was kind of angry. And it was something I was drawn to as a young man. I was an athlete. I got in fights all the time. Like I was just drawn to that energy. Like it was natural for me to be like, hey, I'm in your space. So we were six years old. His sons were about my age and we had had no problems. I didn't know anything. There was nothing.

Like nothing. I had not had any issues with him. He was super aggressive and rude to his boys, but it wasn't like that to me. I was like his prodigy. I was his like little guy that just followed him around. And we were in two different situations that began. One of which was at my grandmother's house. And he pulled me into a bathroom at six. I mean, physically, so I get in there with your arm, but I wouldn't have known any different. I'm six years old.

I don't have anyone to talk to. I don't know. I have no exposure to sex of any kind. Masturbation, anything. I'm six. The fuck do I know about any of this? That was the very first moment. Made me suck his cock, punched me in the head, and threatened to tell me I would kill you if you tell anyone. The images of this, the emotion of it is gone from me because of how much work I've done. But there I am as a six-year-old boy laying on the floor in the bathroom. I have the images of his penis in front of my face, erect, cum on my face, and I'm fucking six.

I have a five-year-old, right? And this shit went on for two years. By the time it all ended, I took everything, boxed it up and put it way down. And people are like, why are you so fucking angry all the time? There was this source of pain that was so intense. This little boy was like a game controller. He's like, we're going to turn him into a mean motherfucker. So this shit never happens. The challenge was I was still in this weird relationship with all powerful men. If you were big, you were powerful. So my answer was get bigger.

to protect myself, no different than a woman who's raped, will tend to get fat. She tries to make herself unattractive and pull away so that this never happens again. And I only know this because I've spoken about this publicly now for seven or eight years. And I'll speak about it in groups of women or I'll speak about it in groups of men and I'll share. Inevitable response. The first time I shared on stage at my men's event, I was like, okay, fuck it, we're going full send. I'm just going to share the whole thing. I said, what I'm about to share with you is graphic and what I'm about to share with you is the facts and what I'm about to share with you is the truth.

I'm not sharing it with you for you to feel sorry for me or to have sympathy for me. God's plan is God's plan. And it turned me into who I am. And all of you have gone through experiences in your past as children that are dark. They're not what you desired. And some are going to be in the range, in the spectrum. Some are going to be real ugly and some are going to be not so ugly, but you're going to have felt like they were ugly. Either way, you're all going to feel the same. So I just shared with everybody. I said, I'm not asking you to raise your hands.

I'm not asking you to, but if some of you in the room have had experiences like this, I need you to understand you can move past this. It is possible. And we have tools here at Wake Up Warrior to help you move past this. Part of the reason why I was so passionate about building what I built was because I was trying to set myself free. Because this one event was fucking me up completely.

Was I gay? Am I straight? The fuck does this mean? My sexuality with my wife was constantly in this weird flux because my mind had blended sex, intimacy, and love as the same conversation. So I couldn't hang out with you, Randall, and feel intimate with you, connected in authenticity, and feel love for you without my brain saying, you want to fuck Randall. I was like, I don't want to fuck Randall. So why? I can't feel this with him. So I'll push you away.

And I'd push people away. So if intimacy ever showed up, I was like, love, intimacy, sex. I don't want to fuck them. Bye. So I didn't have anybody close to me. So I was alone all the time. Even around tons, thousands of people, I was still alone. In my own home, I was alone. My wife would try to be intimate with me. And I thought that meant have sex. I couldn't make the distinction. And where it really became problematic is when my teenagers, or when my 17-year-old first became like 11, 12. And she started growing breasts.

And this whole thing came back up again, which was when I really started taking on healing work with it. Because I was so, I had tickled her back from the time she was little, put her to sleep, loved her, hugged her, kissed her on the mouth, just loved this job. And then she turned 11, 12, and I was like, this thing turned on. You're not a fucking pervert. You're not a fucking pedophile. You are not that fucking guy. And so I just pushed my daughter away. And the part that breaks my heart about the whole thing is,

It's because like typical behavior with all girls. If dad doesn't fucking show up, she will go try to find masculine leadership. And then my daughter was raped. Oh, God. So I'm sitting there in this situation going, dude, if you don't fix this shit and you, you got three other girls. And we did time to support my daughter. And it was so much trying to give her love energy that she needed and healing. But I was broken still. And you can't give healing if you're broke.

A broken man cannot lead his wife. He can't lead his children. And most men I meet are broken. They may not be broken this way, but they're broken in all kinds of ways. And we're in a society where dudes are like, don't cry. You're a pussy. So like my whole life was like that. It was like, don't fucking show emotion. Don't cry. Just be stoic. Be the man. Don't fucking be emotional. Just let this shit kill you from the inside out. Let everybody else be okay. Or you just snap into rage, which is why I was so angry and so violent all the time because I had this thing in me.

So, but it happens, the same happens to my daughter. And now I'm like, okay, I have to stop this. And that put me deep psychedelic world, meditation, energy therapy, therapist, healing over and over and over and over again, doing everything possible we could to try to expose this and heal it. Because it's one thing to tell the truth about something. It's another thing to actually resolve it. And I wasn't, I wasn't figuring out how to do that. And the only thing that resolved this for me was God.

There was no therapy. There was no treatment. There was not enough medicine I could take to get high as fucking kite and try to talk to God. There was a simple surrender. Listen, let it go and give it to me. And that happened just over under three years ago. And for the first time in my life, I felt free from the inside out from this thing.

And my parents knew, didn't know, but my mom had this sick sense of, she always hated my uncle. She didn't know. And my brain had blocked out so much of it as a kid. And as I all started coming back, I started seeing everything. Which is a typical response from people who've been abused when they're little. Their brain will block out what occurred. And they'll have no memories until all their memories come flooding back. And the brain breaks and it releases the truth.

And the truth will set you free. But the truth and the freedom that I was looking for couldn't come from you. It couldn't come from my wife. It couldn't come from a therapist. It couldn't come from a workshop. All those things need help. There was a place of surrender. I had to just let go and let God take it from me. People hear that and they're like, that's mystical. I was like, motherfucker, you don't understand. I invested millions of dollars to try to fix this. Hundreds of hours and ended up in this place where I had no more answers.

And in that place, I had my encounter with God, my first real encounter. And it was supernatural and it was transcendent. And for the first time, I felt free. And the world that I saw completely changed. I saw my wife for the first time. And I suffered because of that, because of how many years I would project my darkness onto this beautiful woman, my children, seeing my children for who they really were.

And how many years I couldn't see them because of this veil in my own mind, my inability to see through my own pain. My pain and our pain becomes nothing more than this window through which we see the world. And all of a sudden this window changed. Now I could be, I could be into with you. I could love you. And my mind was not thinking sexual thoughts. And I could have intimate relationship with my daughters, all four of them, and not have it be a sexual twisted reality in my brain.

I could lead men and love them and hug them and encourage them without having these twisted thoughts. I could be with other people and I have my mind constantly running with these sexual ideas and twisted dark thoughts in my own brain. But the process was fucking excruciating. But I was committed to being free.

It's an incredible story. And one of the things about it that I love the best is the rawness, the vulnerability, and the fact you got up in a group of people, men, and explain what happened to you. I think it's incredible about the amount of people who have been sexually abused. So many. Who haven't reported it for a lot of reasons. And that goes men and women, and it also goes to...

women who have been raped. My daughter's in college and somehow it came up in conversation with a specific person, one of their friends, she wouldn't tell me who it was, said they were at a party and a guy raped her. And it just made me so angry. And I said, well, did she report it? No, why not? Because

she's afraid it's a big deal there's a police record she was a worried that her name was going to be in the newspaper i said that's just so maddening he should report it you got to encourage her and said dad there's no way i think anybody who's been sexually abused should report it i think

I know people are afraid. I know they have fear, but I think justice should be done. I think anyone who sexually abuses somebody else should go to prison. We all know what happens in prison to people who rape somebody else and it's punishment we all deserve. It's not quite what they deserve, but it's the start of a punishment that I think they deserve. I mean, it's a, it's a very difficult topic because a lot of people who have gone through it, the experience of having to relive it is so fierce.

And so a lot of the fear to go relive it is something they'd rather not experience because the pain of it was hard enough the first time. And now they've learned how to cope. The only challenge is they've learned how to cope. They've not learned how to live. And if freedom is the outcome, if freedom is the purpose of this life, if God placed us here to be free, we were not put here to be slaves. We were not put here to struggle and survive. We were put here to create. Did it mean we're going to avoid pain? No.

We're going to have pleasure. Yes. But the pursuit was power, power to create dominion in this earth. Book of Genesis. God gave man dominion to rule over the earth. The problem is most of us can't even dominion and dominate. So we have no dominion over our own lives. And these events that occur for men and women, they're just as traumatic on both sides. And there's so much support for women.

Me too movements and all these movements that are built up to try to empower women to tell the truth. What the fuck are they doing for dudes? None, because to be a man and admit this, you have to be incredibly powerful. No dude wants to admit I had a cock in my mouth and I'm not gay.

No dude wants to say this. They don't want to say my uncle did this or my, or this happened to me or my sister did this. A number of dudes that I know who were by babysitters and nannies forced to have sex with their nannies when they're like seven, eight, nine, 10 years old. They're like, bro. And, but what does that sound like? Oh, you were forced to have sex, bro. Come on. That doesn't fly a man world. It's like in man code in the, in the world, men are not supported in having these situations. And typically when a man comes to that place, he's so broken that,

That to acknowledge it not only shatters the masculine frame, but it gets no fucking support. None. Are you kidding me? Men's Health Awareness Day has now been covered up with LGBTQ. We don't even fucking worry about the guys. Now let's worry about everybody else under the sun. We just got to eliminate the dudes. You're toxic. Shut the fuck up. You don't have any problems. Yet right now, 70% of the divorces are women leaving men and women are complaining every day to me. There's no powerful men. You're not doing anything to empower them.

All there is is empower women, empower women, empower women, empower women, empower women, empower women. Fuck the dudes. Yet at the same time, all these women are upset because there's no powerful dudes. You're part of the fucking problem. You keep calling these men to fall. You're not calling them to rise. You're not digging greatness out of these men. You're not trying to pull greatness out. You're trying to suppress it. And then powerful men in business, what do we face with the choice? Well, Stoke will lock up. We have a small little circle that we might tell some of the truth to.

And we operate with all these skeletons in the closet. Me, I got none. I'm the most powerful motherfucker. I don't give a fuck about money. Billionaire or not, I roll up in, all the dead bodies have been exposed in my life. And once I realized that the most powerful place I could be was truth. Because where truth is, God is. And where God is, transformation is possible. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, don't care. Don't have any belief in any of it, that's fine. Your gateway to transformation is the truth. But the truth is hard.

Because the truth is vulnerable and the truth opens you up to persecution and the truth opens you up to being judged. Yet most of the judgment you get isn't judgment about you. It's the fact that in your freedom, you're exposing the incarceration of people around you. Another thing that people do that gets them into trouble later on is drugs. How young were you when you first tried drugs? What did that look like? What was it? And then at what point did you stop? 15.

And I was never in heroin or meth. I didn't get crazy. I was a pill guy. Opioids were like my deal. I had a friend that came overdosed in college. Scared the shit out of me. So I backed away. Died? Mm-hmm. Yeah. He died in the basement of his parents' house. And nobody found him for five days by a fireplace. So you can only imagine the carnage they walked into.

So I had had kind of an in and out relationship with opioids for about 15 years. To escape all your issues. It was really easy for me because nobody knew you were taking it. Smoking, everybody knows. You're smoking weed, everybody knows. You're shooting up needles, everybody knows. But pills, I was an operator. I'd take two or three perks and just be good. It was enough to mellow me out, but I could still produce and go.

But then two becomes three, three becomes four, four becomes you're piling seven in your mouth at the same time. At some point, your body starts to feel this and it becomes a problem. So I walked away from those about eight, nine years ago. But then trying to step away from alcohol, I got into another substance called feel freeze. They were promoted entrepreneurs as like the healthy alternative to alcohol.

Now, doing talk about this program, feel free to sue me, but fuck you guys. Whatever. Here's the reality. You didn't do anything wrong. I abused. It wasn't a substance. It was just my addictive personality. They have recommended dosage of this Acava creative mix as fermented, but when taken in high enough doses like morphine. They recommend one a day. Of course, my addictive personality, I got to 12.

My doctor's like, you're basically morphing all day. But again, I'm an operator with opioids, which means I can just operate and create, operate and create. My wife came to me two years ago. This is when I kicked that one. And she came to me flat out. She said, listen, we have everything. We have the money, the cars, the house, the trip, the travel, the jewelry. We have the kids. We have everything. For the last year, I can't feel you. I can't feel you so much to the point that for the last six months, my mind has been wandering.

I've been thinking about fucking other men. I've been thinking about being with other powerful men, men who can see me and men I can feel. If you don't fix this shit, I'm out. And I use a statement to wake up a warrior, which is if the king doesn't rise, the kingdom dies, right? And my wife started texting me every day. If the king doesn't rise, the kingdom dies. And don't worry, the queen leaves with the children before it burns. I mean, what the fuck? But I needed it.

I needed it. I couldn't hear it any other way. Most men cannot hear. They think their wives are critical bitches. The truth is these women know the truth of who we are. And when we slip off the pedestal of king and we leave the throne and we find ourselves out fucking around outside the castle, the queen stays in the castle and going, hey, what the fuck are you doing? You're a critical bitch. Don't talk to that way. You're out playing with the whores outside the castle again.

I have been sitting here carrying this goddamn throne with all these children while you wander the fuck out there and don't, what are you doing? But when you're in that place, you can't get it until it's aggressive. That's why women technically had to leave before dudes get it. And they're like, fuck, I'm about to lose everything. I'm a founder, wake up warrior. I teach this shit. People are like, well, what did that do for your brand? Nothing. I've never said I was perfect. I'm not a pastor trying to be in a plastic box.

I'm just living and I'm going to live my life out loud and you're going to see all of it. So I was very open about that. But also for about three months, I thought I was going to lose everything again. I thought she was going to leave. She had money. She's powerful. She has her own businesses. She doesn't need my money. And that was the piece that started the real breakdown and breakthrough for me in the last two years to just a deeper commitment to my truth in God and really asking myself questions. Why do you keep going back to these things? Pressure, stress, same reasons every entrepreneur does. But the problem is when you're using stuff that you can actually operate with,

You think you can operate, but you get dull, not as sharp, not as clean, not as focused. And any truth of God trying to come through you gets distorted. So I'm having this conversation with God and I'm like, man, I'm doing everything you're telling you. He said, no, you're doing 10% of what I tell you. You keep shooting all the partners I'm trying to bring to you. You keep pushing away that I'm sending to help you. And the worst part is the one woman who wants to feel all of you is dying inside. So you have a choice. Just like you've always had a choice. I'm never going to force you to do anything. What do you want?

And again, I got really clear about what that was and what we've done the last two years has been equal to or more than what we did in the previous 10. So this path to that men run into and entrepreneurs in particular at the high level is that we have been taught to only share half the truth. And so everybody has these scaled, these closets full of skeletons and all this dark shit that they don't have to do with. I'm on the front side, look good. Shoes look good. Wife looks good. Everybody looks good except for behind closed doors. I know because these do, I get these texts every day.

This powerful dude, the names of people who come to me that I don't talk about to anybody. I'm a vault. The Ferris guys are in the problems guys are in the struggles are in they're real, but where's the guy to go? Well, let me, let me, let me ask about that because I think this is very important.

I'm 56 and I think there's a fulcrum in terms of when people get married. I think you're getting married between 20 and 30 years old. I think you love that person. Obviously you can envision the future with that person. I think what people don't really understand is no matter how perfect your marriage seems at that time, and it may be perfect, you're making a bet on how you're going to grow individually as people. Yes. Because people do grow individually and then they grow apart and

And as a result of all this, I think there's a window between

Sort of 37 and 41. I'm seeing it with my own friends, my own relationships. I remember when I was getting divorced to my wife, Laura, I went to my rabbi and I said, hey, this is what's happening. And no one knew that there were any issues behind the scene at all. And every marriage has issues and marriages work. But what he said to me, Garrett, was,

your divorce is going to cause people to get divorced. And I said, why is that? He said, because you have everything. You know, you have a beautiful house, you have money, you get along well, which we did for the most part. And that's exactly what happened. Most of our friends now divorced within four or five years. I'm not saying we were the cause, but I think it, it

People look at you and say, okay, gosh, you know, I'm not as happy as I should be. My mom has said to me a time, you know, we all have a right to be happy and you only get one go around in life. Yeah. Many of my friends are the people I know who are okay.

Many of my friends in their marriage don't like their wives. Women don't like their husbands. I think there's a few reasons why people don't get divorced. I think kids, you know, they think, all right, your kids are not going to be okay. And I think the message there is when the

When the plane's going down, you have to put on your mask before you can take care of your kids. I think people are afraid to be by themselves, loneliness. I certainly was. And then the third one is money. You either have too much or too little. And then there's usually a war. Too many, and I didn't have a war with my wife, and I think that's something that a lot of men need to really think about is,

There's a lot of emotion when people get divorced, obviously, and people fight most about the money. And when you fight about the money and you fight till the end and fight till the death, there's so many scars there that you can't co-parent as you should. What's your advice to everyone out there listening, the tens of thousands of people who are in these marriages or relationships, particularly marriages with kids who are unhappy? What would you tell them in a short time

bite-sized direct way should they get divorced or should they try to work it out they should tell the truth i guess where it all starts tell the truth like if you look at what happens inside all relationships exactly monogamous marriage is like one of the craziest ideas we've ever had but if you can pull it off if you can pull it off you're superheroes in a world of people who can't get it together you're a superhero so and i'm like listen most of the guys that have worked with one-on-one the last like five years 60 percent have gotten divorced

And I've married many of them and I'm going to marry a bunch of them this year to these superpower women that they're with now. And I watched the suffering and I experienced the suffering myself in my marriage for over 12 years. And I know what that feels like. And there's this desire to stay together under a lie. The problem is not that.

that they're getting divorced. The problem is they're staying married under a lie, which is, I don't really want to be with you. I don't want to be with you. Painful. Painful to say that to someone. Super painful. Very painful for my wife to say in therapy, listen, it's not that I don't want to fuck. I just don't want to fuck him. And I was like, oh shit, that's heavy. This beautiful woman doesn't want to sleep with me, but wants to be taken just not by me. As a dude, you're like, what the fuck? But at least it was honest though.

I was like, okay, at least we can get some. This was us like six, seven years ago, getting to truth with each other because the option of divorce was on the table in 2016, 2019. We talked about it again in 2022. It's not powerful relationships. That conversation is going to come up where, hey, two people are growing in their own soul path and we're trying to keep ourselves connected. But in that place, what I would say is this, before you get divorced, pretend the following.

What are you committed to in marriage? What do you want in a partner? Then before you just say, fuck you, invite them into that picture. Talking to my wife, I said, I want four things. One, I want to be in a relationship with a woman that has a purpose beyond me and our children.

Two, I want to be in a relationship with a woman who we can be authentically all of ourselves. Our dark and our light, our full bullshit. You're a bitch. I'm an asshole. We can be that and we're not running away. At the same time, we can be inspiring and aspirational and all the great things. Three, I want to co-create something with this woman to do something together. And four, TTF. Tell me, touch me, fuck me. I am not a bad looking man. Tell me I'm the fucking man. As a dude, I want to hear that. When I work this hard, I want you to walk in and be like, hey.

Thank you. You're amazing. Most women don't do that because it's like the husband's ego is already too big. I don't want to tell him this. Yet the only thing we actually want at the end of the day is the one woman we cared about. I said, I'm going to be with this vagina. I want to be with you. Please just tell me that I'm doing good. Just tell me. Touch me. Touch me on my leg. When you walk in a room, touch my arm. Sit by me. Put your hand on me. I didn't say sexual. Just touch me. And third, fuck me. Because the way I feel loved is when we have sex. If we don't have sex, I don't feel loved.

So getting into that dichotomy, what are you committed to? And then don't play up from who she is or who he is. And then invite them into this picture. But your commitment is to go to the picture with or without them. You're my first choice. You don't want to go. That's fine. I'm going to go here. I'm going to have this. I want you to be there with me. If you don't want to go there, okay, I'm still going to go there with or without you. But you're my first choice. If you choose not to be my first choice, okay.

Fair enough. You're a free agent unto yourself. Choose your path. My wife and I, even to this day, every year we'll sit down and say, okay, we still in? Because if I'm not your number one choice, I will be the first one to pack your bags. I'll give you all the money you want. And I'd like to meet this guy. This motherfucker has got to be a savage. Because if I'm number two, I want to meet number one. I can gracefully take defeat and I can assess and go, well, you're better than me. Good job. Here she is. Vice versa. If she's not my number choice,

Should do the same thing with me. If I'm not your number one woman, you don't want to be with me. I'm not going to sit around and beg you. You go leave, go be with her. This is incredibly challenging because the level of truth that you have to sit in to be that honest with somebody that you know, when you speak your truth, it will hurt them. But you also have to be ready to receive that truth. It doesn't go one way. My wife shares her shared her darkest, deepest truths with me, suppressed anger and frustration for 20 years.

And it came all out of me for six months straight two years ago, every day triggers from a fair from 15 years ago, all of the shit. And I had to show I was man enough to sit and take it. And at the end of that, what I will tell you is a principle biblically, which is one flesh. But my wife and I found was something I thought was impossible, impossible. And I don't know if it's possible. It's something that's not possible after divorce. It's just to get there. No matter who you are, you're going to have to reset. So if you get divorced, you're going to reset.

And you're going to have to find this path anyways. And you're going to go through the same bullshit, just a different person. Because you brought the bullshit into the relationship. If you don't fix your bullshit, that bullshit is going to be with another vagina if you're a guy. Be with another penis if you're a woman. So you better figure yourself out. If you don't figure yourself out, it doesn't matter. And why not give it a try?

By aspiring to this thing you desire and invite the person who's been with you there and see. Because both parties, when they get divorced, are all going to go on the divorce diet. They're both going to get fit and tan and they're going to be caring about themselves and they're going to present the best selves in the world. Whereas in marriage, most of the time, we just wait for the divorce. Then I'm going to be jacked and juicy. I'm going to go hang out with a bunch of Latina girls in Miami. I'm going to be the man. Or you could just be the fucking man with the woman you're with now. And you might be surprised that the woman you're with dies.

And the woman she becomes is this thing you always wanted. And she was right there. But you wouldn't put in the energy with her the same way you would when you get divorced. And now all of a sudden you'd be focused. It's like dudes are fat. They get divorced, get jacked. You're like, why don't you get jacked while you were married? Why didn't you guys take care of each other when you were married? Why do you have to get divorced and go handle with somebody else? Because you're going to go through the same bullshit again. She's not going to be perfect. She's not going to be everything you think she is. She's going to have problems. She has a period. She has a month. She gets angry. All women do.

Guess what? Dudes who produce also are assholes. As calm and nice as you are to get where you are, you have to be an asshole. There's a part of dark side of business you have to be, which means inside of all of us, which means ladies, no dude's perfect and no dude can fulfill all your desires. It's impossible. I can't fulfill all my wife's desires. And maybe 85%. That means 15% of fantasy is going to be in her world. She's going to have to find other ways to fulfill that. I can't be everything for her. She can't be everything for me. But this one flush principle can.

which is a connection of soul. It's what I actually find beyond sex. Most dudes think they're after an orgasm. They're actually after the piece of connection after it, the desire to be wanted, which is why I believe most men are look at porn or go to porn because they see women who desire this man. It might be all bullshit and fake, but even the idea of it, of being wanted is the thing that everybody's missing. Nobody feels seen. They don't feel wanted. Fuck it. I'll go find somebody else who sees me, wants me, and that'll last for a bit.

And then it'll fade just like every relationship. And they have to do work again. One of the things about people in marriages who probably shouldn't be in marriages is their commitment to the oath they take, you know, for better, for worse, sickness or in health.

My ex-wife's a great person, great mom. My kids say, and great personality, people love her. But it doesn't mean that you're right for one another. My kids, we have three beautiful kids for them. So I can't imagine you ever being together. And what comes, and when you're getting divorced and people think you have everything and you're happy, what starts to happen, as you may know, is you start getting these phone calls. They say, hey, Randy, do you want to have lunch? And one of my friends,

closest friends to this day called me up and said, hey, Randy, let's have dinner. And he said, I respect you and admire you for your courage. And I said, what are you talking about? Well, I've been having an affair on my wife for five years now. He mentioned the woman. I knew the woman, beautiful, of course. And I said, I don't view it as courage. I view it as doing the right thing for myself and who I am. I think it's fair to

her because if you're not getting along, I think at some age, it's important to allow somebody else to have the opportunity to meet someone else who's better for them rather than stay in a marriage and say, all right, now I'm 55 years old. And for better or for worse, I'm not being chauvinistic about this, but I think it's easier and maybe the playing field is larger for a man who's 60 years old getting divorced than it may be for a woman. My mom was

single at 70 years old in Detroit, you know, the talent pool there is slim. You know, she's going on match.com, which I encourage her to go on. And she's like, Randy, she finally found her an amazing life partner. And what's interesting in those lunches, I said, hey, you know, man, you okay?

What do you mean? Is your marriage okay? Oh, yeah, yeah. Marriage is great. Well, it's interesting. I haven't heard from you in two years, and here we are sitting to have lunch. And what's great about this, if you have friends that are getting divorced, and it's very lonely, it's depressing, even though it may be the right thing for you, it's just tough sitting there in your house by yourself when you've got kids. And you want it when you're in the marriage. What you want is when you've got kids.

Three kids, a live-in nanny, a dog. Everyone's in the house. It's rare that there's no one in the house. I remember when I was married to my first wife, I think I had one hour where everyone was gone. I said, gosh, this is so nice.

And then when it was forced upon you and you're in this house half the time, big house, your dream house by yourself, it really sucked. But I think it's really important for your friends to reach out to you. I know that in some situations I was toxic because none of my married friends' wives wanted to have dinner with me and a new girl or a girl that I was dating, Doug Amoff. I just want to mention this to you. Married to...

the Vice President of the United States. We've been friends since we were 24 years old, first year lawyers in Los Angeles. And he had been divorced before and he reached out to me and he said, and I've known Doug at that point for a long time. I got married when I got divorced when I was 38. Doug and I met when we were 24.

New to LA, he had volunteered on this nonprofit charity function that I started called the Justice Ball. It was basically for free nonprofit law firm. And I'll never forget that.

dog reaching out to me, an amazing person and all the other people who reach out to me. And there weren't that many. So my advice is that people, and it's not just for divorce, but be there for your friends. Your friends are going to go through hard times and they're going through things that you're even think you're going to maybe going through one day or hope that they don't happen to you. This is the reason I built Wake Up Warrior because men didn't have a place to go. And when I needed someone to turn to, I had nobody.

and the church groups weren't getting it done and the bible studies weren't getting it done and the masterminds weren't getting it done and so i built a place for men to be safe where they could tell the truth you could still be powerful and you could be weak you could be struggling you don't have to hide you don't have to be in your house alone i've watched i've watched many of my guys hundreds of my guys get divorced over the years and that factor is accurate they all go on a bender for about six months

And then they end up in this lonely place. And on the speaking of it too, there's a lonelier place and it's called being in a relationship that doesn't work. And you suffer and you struggle and you desire, or you have side chicks and you do the side thing while you're trying to pretend it's together. Yet everything along this, you're just lying to yourself. And this piece of truth, the truth comes with pain. And sometimes that means you're going to feel alone for a season. And inside of that, yes, a lot of divorced people to marry people become, uh,

cancerous because of how weak their marriages are. And because they're contagious. Yeah. You know, women, if you're a man, you're getting divorced and, and well, it exposes, exposes their relationship. If they're weak in their relationship and they see you do this, it becomes an example because now the exposure level. Now, if your marriage is solid and you're strong and you're committed, a divorce doesn't threaten you at all.

But if you're weak in your marriage and you've been hiding and lying and somebody next to you demonstrates the courage to say, listen, this doesn't work. I'm choosing to move forward with my life. I love you. And at the same time, this doesn't work for me. I cannot do this anymore. I cannot continue to lie to myself. I'm going to move on. And in that place, it rattles relationships because nobody talks about divorce rate. Nobody talks about the depress rate.

Of all the married couples who fucking hate each other and they're not happy and they're surviving. And all those people from my parents' generation, my parents should have been divorced. My in-laws should have been divorced, but they came from a time where divorce wasn't even on the table. I mean, it wasn't even an option. So like my mother and my mother-in-law both are despised at some level, their husbands, and they're verbal about it because they're powerful women that were men just, they weren't, these men did the best they could, but they weren't what these women wanted. Truly. I watched the separations. I've watched it happen, but nobody talks about that piece.

What percentage of marriage are actually happy? I don't know. I don't know how you would like statistically dial up. I know this. There are more happy second marriages than there are first marriages. Right. Let me, let me stop you there because I wanted to mention this before and I was going to mention now, but one of the things about being divorced is as much as you can be toxic. Now it can be a light of future because I found the most amazing woman in the world. I know. And you know,

people will look at me now and say, you know, that could be me. And that's just so warming and heartfelt. And, you know, I, I got friends. I mean, I have a woman friend who hasn't had sex with her husband in 12 years. I know. And it's like, why aren't you divorced? Look at, look at, look at what I have. I'm so lucky. You know, I was divorced seven and a half years, man. I dated all the wrong women, right. Looking for the right one. And, and, and,

When I met Madison, we met a few years before and she was living in New York and it's kind of a crazy story. She had her best friend named Maddie. My wife is Madison and Maddie and I were friends and I wanted to date Maddie and we went on a date and she says it wasn't a date, but Madison was in town working and

She came to dinner at the last minute. I'm like, oh shit, you know, this is not good. And then we went to dinner and then we went back to my house to play the Wii video game. We're playing tennis and all this other stuff and driving the car. And, and this is, you know, 10 o'clock at night. And, uh, we played the drums, which is in the bedroom, but we had fun. These two beautiful women sitting on the edge of my bed till two in the morning while I'm playing the drums.

And I'm like, you know, I tell the story, well, did anything kinky happen when you got these two beautiful women in your bedroom? I said, no, no. But we exchanged phone numbers on Facebook and Madison posted something on Facebook, going to Hawaii with my boyfriend for two weeks. I can't wait. So I texted her, is this the engagement trip? And she wrote back, hardly. And so I'd been at the place where they had been a few times before. And I texted her four days into the trip. Hey, how's the trip growing? And said, we broke up. Now I barely knew her.

Right. And when I said, well, what I said to her is when she said, hardly, I said, you shouldn't settle. You know, you're great. And she'll tell the story now, you know, who the fuck were you to say that you don't even know me. But what I have and which nobody else knows.

and this is true in business, you have an opportunity, you're a business guy, you gotta seize the moment. And my moment and the way that my brain works is do it now because you can miss it by a millisecond. So I had material, non-public inside information. If you trade on that,

In the stock market, you're going to jail about it. But if you trade on that in your personal life, you're going to have the best possible life in the world. And that's what happened to me because no one knew she'd broken up with her boyfriend. So I said, oh, I want to come take you to dinner. She said, oh, no, I'm living with my boyfriend. I got to get on with my life. And she said, maybe this...

my sister's getting married in the fall. I'll be in Los Angeles. I don't believe in maybes. Maybes are not a good thing. As a businessman, successful businessman, you got to hit it right now. And like I said, you're going to miss it by a millisecond. So,

uh she was having none of that my stepdad at that point was sick with cancer and but he was supposed to come out to los angeles i think my uh one of my kids was graduating uh from maybe kindergarten or something like that and she had canceled a whole bunch of times he was sick and my kids would very much get unhappy and say oh he can't say well he's sick you know uh

Grandma Bunny is what they call. My mom can't come out because Papa Bear, that was what they called my stepfather was sick. I remember being at the Shell gas station

that I can't come this weekend. I'm so sorry. Hang up the phone, call Madison said, I'm going to come to New York this weekend for the freeze art fair. And I, I collect art. I love art. It's a passion. I had no plans, Garrett, going to New York, but suddenly, you know, 10 minutes later, I booked a trip and said, I'd like to take you to dinner. And it was great. You know, uh, Madison had just broken up with her boyfriend. Yeah. I went there. We had a dinner both nights. And I said to her, when I, when I, uh,

when I left, I mean, I felt like we had a great connection. I don't care what you're doing in New York, which is a total fucking bullshit lie, by the way. But I want you to know that when I go back to LA, I'm not going to date anyone else. I think there's a future here, but you could date whoever you want to do. And I'm like, God, please don't date anybody. That would just torture on my soul.

And we got engaged three months later because I knew what I wanted. She was the most amazing person in the world. She was...

smart, graduated business school, graduated college in three years, 24 AP credits, I think, coming in, self-supportive, had four jobs in New York when I met her, loves football. I'm a huge football fan. Go Lions. I hope this is the year. I love it. You know, the best ever, long-suffering Lions fan. And, you know, here we are 11 and a half years later. So the message is,

I want to send to everybody, as much as I talked about, you shouldn't be in a marriage if you're unhappy as...

it allows you the opportunity to have a second life. And I think having been divorced the first time, and again, I don't recommend people get divorced unless they really need to. And if you're not going to fix your problems, why fake it? Why do it? But if you are going to get divorced and it's right for you, there can be and is an amazing second life. I have two beautiful kids with

with my wife and people will look at me now and say, all right, maybe Randy is, was the inspiration of me getting divorced. And maybe he is today, but for a better reason, which is look at what he has today. And I feel like I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I'm happy for you. Your, your story of redemption in terms of what you went through, sexual abuse, difficulties in marriage affairs,

You also built a very successful business. I want to talk about your business career. I want to talk about the ups and downs. You built three very successful mortgage companies. You had personal issues, drug issues, and then the great financial crisis of 2008 where a lot of people lost their businesses. Can you tell us just about your entrepreneurial instinct in terms of the rise and fall of your businesses? And what are the three lessons that you would give somebody else starting a business that

going into something in the future? And what are the three best things you learned from those businesses failing? The implosion of our first round of companies was really a leadership thing on my side. There were plenty of guys at the time in banking and mortgages that did fine. They contracted. I didn't listen to mentors. So I had mentors who literally sat with me and said, compress your company down to 10 to 15 people. Let 100 plus people go. Go to cash. Get out of real estate. Sit and wait.

One of them was a mentor of mine who actually passed away six months after he gave me the advice. I was young. I was in my 30s. I thought this thing would just go forever. I was a PE teacher and became a mortgage guy and a real estate guy and didn't know anything else. I'd never known loss. So I got to learn loss. So the first one was listen to your mentors. People have gone before you. They know the path. They see the trends. They know what's going on. Just because you've had success doesn't mean you're going to always have success. And one of the fastest ways to not have it is not listening to people who have gone before you. So that's number one. Number two.

We had lived in a game of deception in banking, not intentionally. I didn't understand entrepreneurism as a whole. I was really a high-paid hitman.

And I had a crew of 100 hype and hit men. And we worked for big banks and we went and sold shit. We didn't know anything. We just were hit men. We sold. I wasn't really an entrepreneur at that time. We had larger companies. We had success. We had money, but that didn't mean I was an entrepreneur. So the second thing to determine is that not everyone's an entrepreneur. Some of the greatest success people have is working for pure entrepreneurs. And while there's this massive message of everyone's an entrepreneur, the truth is that's not true. The spirit of entrepreneurism is in everyone.

the spirit to create and go. But most people cannot bear the burden, the weight of being a founder and a CEO of a company. To be a true CEO, to be a true entrepreneur, you have to be crazy. You have to have the capacity to create from nothing. You have to believe at a level that most will never believe. You have to suffer at a level most will never suffer. You have to hurt in ways no one can imagine and it never turns off. Most people will make more money with the spirit of entrepreneurs and being entrepreneurs behind crazy people.

and helping build support and infrastructure with the entrepreneurial spirit. So this was something I was never taught. So I didn't know any different. I just thought we all had to be entrepreneurs. So I had to learn all of these skills over the last 25 years, pushing myself to a place I probably would have never gone had I had a pure mentor entrepreneur who I could just tuck under the wing and go. And I probably would have made more money because I could do the things that I was uniquely great at. I didn't necessarily want to have all these skills. It wasn't my desire. I just had to get them because the only way to run the business was to have these skills.

So the second piece, the third piece was everything comes back to truth. So if you're not listening to your mentors and you're actually not committed to the entrepreneurial journey of suffering, the success is follow suffering at the highest level. There's not one guy I've met that's built anything of success that does not have a dark trail.

There's a darkness that comes with this stewardship and that darkness is not worshiping money and it's not hurting people. There's just a heaviness and a weight that perpetually pushes. It will affect your marriage, your children and everything. And if you can get through it and you know, it's why warrior exists. We use tools now I didn't have available to me to be able to stabilize who I am as a man to lead. So we have more entrepreneurs rising in our organization than ever because of these tools, because of the things we do every day as men to keep ourselves in check. But the foundation of all this is truth.

And if you can't tell the truth to yourself and you can't tell the truth to your teams and the truth to your teams can't tell the truth to you, then number one, you're not getting the right data. You're not getting the right optics. You're not making the right decisions. Everything's based upon a gut feeling, which at some level has to happen. But at some level, things have to be backed up with numbers and math and science. You have to back things up. You have to live in truth at the same time, live in this place of vision that you're moving towards. But without truth, there's no vision because now it's fantasy. The vision becomes fantasy with no foundation of truth.

So in that truth, now I can choose something different. And Wake Up Warrior became the birth child of not just helping entrepreneurs rise. It was helping entrepreneurs rise with everything with them. So tell everybody what that is. We built a system, a game.

Simple as that app curriculum for married businessmen with children to figure out how to weaponize themselves physically connect to God, deep, deeply sexually, emotionally, spiritually connected to their wife. Like they had just met like a rebirth in the relationship and how to continue to accelerate profits at the same time while leading their children. How can you do all of this at once? Cause every mentor I'd ever had in my entire life was on one side of scale. The other big money, right?

and life wreck falling apart, or on the flip side, had become very zen and kind of said, eh, to the money. And I was like, can you be zen and be wealthy? Can you do it all at once? We figured out how.

It's not even a guesswork for us anymore. It's a science. The men that submit into the games that we play, we teach them how to play the Warriors way. It's a game we play every day. It's an ideology. It's an operating system. And it works for every single man that we've ever worked with who chooses to work the system. And when they work the system, they win. Some of the things that you ask your people to do in these seminars, and I don't know if it's a seminar, maybe your coaching program, is you do crazy things. They're very difficult, like...

Throwing somebody into the ocean blindfolded, having someone go into a cemetery and say you're going to die in 20 minutes and you have to write something to save yourself to live. What's that about? So when we first started Warrior, men were different than they are now. So 12, 13 years ago when we started Warrior, men were much more shut down. Roll out what's occurred in the last 12 years. Politically, COVID, all of the shit that's gone sideways. Men are hurting more than ever. So we started that way because the only way to get men to tell the truth was exhaust them.

So we exhausted him, beat the shit out of him, made him fight each other. Our application question was, if you were coming into war, it was, have you ever punched a man in the face? Have you ever been punched by a man in the face?

We knew you were going to get punched and you're going to punch somebody because you were coming to our camp, which means you were going to fight. So we had 50 year old dudes who'd never punch anyone beating the shit out of each other. And they fucking loved it. Founders of companies, CFOs who'd never hit anyone. The craziest dudes were the dudes who'd never fought anybody. What a great marketing plan. Hey, come, come, come, come here. Release the rage with a bunch of bros. That's it. And that's what we did. And the dudes lined up for fucking eight straight years for it. Every two weeks, 10,000 a pop.

New York Times called it the $10,000 man cult. Tried to run a smear campaign on us. They couldn't because all of our top dudes were like, if this is a cult, well, fuck. If a cult means I'm more fit, more connected to God, having better sex with my wife, making more money, my children trust me more. Well, that's a cult I want to be part of. So go fuck yourself. And we just pushed this thing forward. Now, over time, it became less necessary for two reasons. One, our dudes got older.

So when we launched it 13 years ago, we were younger and the dudes tend to come there my age. I'm 48, almost 49 and dudes at 52, their bodies are great. But the, but when our big impossible games for the year with a lot of our guys are, I'm going to get a colonoscopy this year. We've, we've, we've come to it. Yeah, that's right. Colonoscopy. Let's fucking go. We're not 30 anymore. So we had to move away from a lot of that one because it just a physical game. There's too many injuries. And the second piece was it wasn't necessary. Okay.

Now guys come to the door and there's so much pain.

The truth is a conversation works. And so we went away from that. Although a lot of groups have launched following our lead and still run those. And those are very useful for most of our guys are very established dudes or deep thinkers are very logical and they're trapped emotionally inside. And so we come in our world. We have different tools. Now they're actually more effective, more efficient. So a lot of people think in order to participate in warrior, I have to go get my ass kicked. No, no, no. You don't have to get physically beat up. We're going to train your body, but we're going to put you in a place with tools we have now that allow you to spiritually set yourself free.

And that's the shift. We were going from the outside in. Now we know how to go from the inside out. And in less than a couple of weeks, I can do what used to take us two or three years with a guy. And this guy will be living in truth and power in a way he wasn't living before. And to sign up, where do they go to sign up and be part of the program? Our baseline is just wakeupwarrior.com. It's like the great place to start. Great entry point. There's also a great podcast. My wife and I run together called date your wife.

It's a great place to start to the Date Your Wife podcast found on all platforms and wakeupwarrior.com. It's kind of the entry point to our world where you can learn everything about it. We talked about a couple of things already that made people successful, not only in personal life, but in the business life. One of the things that's made me successful, if not the most successful thing is

my preparation, I call it extreme preparation. How important has preparation, extreme preparation, preparing for a meeting, speech, whatever it is, 20 hours, 40 hours, when someone else is prepared 30 minutes, which is the average time someone actually does prepare for a meeting. So what I can tell is not only are you one who extremely prepares. I went and started listening to your shows. I just listened to four different shows. I'm listening for the first 10 minutes into the show. And I was like, there's no fucking way. He just knows this.

Like they had to prepare like crazy. I was listening for an hour to an hour and a half long podcast. And you were question after question after question that weren't just like general. Hey, so tell me about how you feel about life. Hey, so tell us your backstory about your business. No, you were like, when you were a kid, what about this? What about this? How about that person? What about that girl, Sally, that you hung out with in sixth grade? And how about this move over here? And then when you took this, the question and sequence that you've done is the most unique thing I've ever seen a podcast interview ever do.

Like only person who probably prepares as much as you as Joe Rogan, because he tends to know fucking everything about everybody too. You on the other hand, most shows are free flow, go, go, go. And we kind of talk. And so people kind of get some insight from it. You're questioning and your ability to study and prepare. I mean, you, you set this up with me and somehow sit until three o'clock in the morning, studying for seven, eight hours, my life. So you could come in with questions to ask.

I may have fucked all those up, but nonetheless, we were here and you did it. And I could tell when you walked in and I could tell from all the other shows you do. Your unique talent in this is the fact that you're committed to that.

which is exactly why you've had success in business because you don't want to come to the table and just deliver up fluff and deliver up another podcast. It's a strategic move to show people how they can get value by you asking the right questions to get the gold out of people you're interviewing. I'm impressed. I was impressed like before I got here, just listen to the show because a guy who studies people who do things like this,

You were different. You were unique, very different. I now understand why everybody wants to be on your show because they're as excited about the questions you're going to ask because they're getting asked the questions that no one asks them in a normal podcast. My preparation is a little bit different, right? So you have people who prepare decks and slides and all that's very important. I don't disagree with this. My preparation is frameworks. So I love flow. So I can do things naturally in flow that a lot of people cannot.

For example, I'm in events where the power goes down and people can't show their PowerPoints and the speaker and trainer is fucked. Not me.

so i got used to vibe boards which is now what i use vibe boards ipads flip charts so i have frameworks inside so i prepare for 15 20 hours frameworks frameworks are concepts or ideas that i want to use but they're interchangeable unlike a script or a powerpoint deck that's like a b c d i have all the letters of the alphabet available to me and then i enter the most important preparation for me which is energetic and spiritual connection

Am I grounded? Because in that place now, I can move a room or a negotiation. I can move a negotiation and swap frames out real time instead of being caught to a script. So for me, scripts don't work. What does work is preparation, but my preparation is different. So at a big event, some dudes will spend 40 hours on their PowerPoint slide in order to do their pitch. Me, I'll spend 10 hours building frames, and then I'll spend another 20 hours meditating, grounding, directives,

doing my work, keeping me connected. I'll sit in the rooms or I'll prepare by being in people's energy. And then I unleash with no script. And now my frameworks just pop. I pull them like from a server in the back of my brain. And I'll start a framework over here and then I'll see we need to shift. I'll pause that one, come over here, pull this framework out. Then I'll come and pull one out over here and then I'll mix them together and go. Frameworks are what scripts are. They're just less.

Instead of like four paragraphs, I have four statements. These four statements typically follow alliteration and they move people from here to there. And those frameworks work for me, but it doesn't mean I don't prepare. I just prepare differently than most people.

Well, that means the world to me. It really does. And I appreciate you. And I'm writing a book called Extreme Preparation. So I'm excited for you to read it. And if you want to write a little blurb in it and if you love the book, then I'd be grateful. But this has been one of the best shows I've ever done. We went to a place where I've never gone before in 150 podcasts that I've done. And I appreciate...

your story. It's motivating. It's inspiring. I think it's amazing what you've done to encourage people that have been sexually abused and being a real person and showing vulnerability, which for a man is very difficult. For most men I know to do, we're taught not to do that. And just the lessons you've learned from the rise and fall of your business and especially what you've done to rebuild this incredible relationship

coaching program and inspiring, motivating tens of thousands of people around the world. I really congratulate you. I admire you. And I'm excited to hang with you again. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you having me. It's a great show. Thank you. And again, shout out to Andrew Loringer. We put this thing together in 24 hours. I was coming down to Miami. I did a show with Tony Robbins.

I said, hey, you got the studio. I'll come anytime. It could be one in the morning, whatever. He said, I got this great guy, Garrett White. He's amazing. You're going to love him. So shout out to Andrew for making this happen. All the intros that he's made, incredible. Andy Elliott's coming on the show. Love him. Thanks to my man right here, Andrew. So grateful. If you're coming to Miami, shoot at the move. Best studio around. Amen.