Ep602: Andrew L. Howell – Don’t Invest in a Business With Family

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello, fellow risk takers and welcome to My Worst Investment Ever, stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that when in investing, you must take a risk, but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And that mission has led me to create the Become a Better Investor Community. In the community and you get access to our global asset allocation strategies and stock portfolios, our investment research weekly live sessions, and the risk reduction lessons I've learned from more than 500 guests just go to my worst investment ever.com To learn more fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast hosts Andrew Stotz, from A. Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Andrew, how Andrew, are you ready to join the mission?

Andrew L. Howell 00:52
Let's do it. I'm excited.

Andrew Stotz 00:54
All right. Well, as I said to you before we turn on the microphone, and so the recorder is I'll never forget your name. What a great.

Andrew L. Howell 01:05
That's right. That's right. I said the same thing to you that you're well named.

Andrew Stotz 01:10
Exactly. So let me introduce you to the audience. Andrew L. Howe is a co-founder of the Salt Lake City firm, your cow, which is known as one of Utah's fastest-growing companies. Andrew has built a successful practice throughout the United States with respect to estate planning, asset protection, planning, probate, and estate administration, charitable giving, sophisticated business structuring and transactions and tax planning. He is most passionate about the family legacy planning that he assists his clients with. And he has a specific focus on ultra high net worth Families and business owners. He's also the co-author of the book entrusted building a legacy Then last, which features seven core disciplines of successful wealth transfer of high net worth families, going back hundreds of years, he is also the co-author of a follow-up book called riveted 44 values that change the world. My goodness, Andrew, take a minute and tell us about the unique value that you bring to this wonderful world.

Andrew L. Howell 02:20
Well, what I what I think I bring is more heart in a state planning than than what I see from my colleagues. Let me explain. And it probably comes I probably need to explain a little bit back, go back a little bit history wise within my family. My grandfather was a very, very important person in my life. Very, very successful attorney of his own. He was a Harvard law grad, did estate planning work, but you know, his clientele include people like the Browning family, just these enormous, huge families that he worked with. And my parents were divorced when I was fairly young, and my grandpa was really active in my life and didn't let me sit idle. Okay. And that's, look, I didn't like him at the time for that. I mean, at 12 years old, I was at his office being a gopher, right. And then I wanted to be out riding bikes with my friends. And you know, I hated it. I hated I did, I'd really despised him for it. And I couldn't be happier right now that he made me do stuff like that. But he was also very good about including me. And I remember that. This one time I was at his office, and I was probably 12 1314, somewhere in that ballpark. And this new client or not new client, but an existing client of his was coming in. And he's a it was very wealthy man here in Utah. He since passed away, but he owned Sinclair oil and a couple of hotels here. He's a gentleman by the name of Earl holding, and Earl was a really nice man. And he came in to my grandpa's office for a checkup meeting, kind of like an annual estate planning meeting, if you will. And I'll have clients come in and we'll have these annual checkups and they'll tell me about you know, a new rental property they purchased or, or vacation property in Florida, something like this. Well, Earl came in and was talking to my grandpa about this new four miles of ocean front that he had purchased in Santa Barbara, California. And I mean, just this tremendous asset, right. And I just watched these two gentlemen have this conversation about the impact that this asset was going to have in the family. I don't remember my grandpa asking how much the asset was even worth it was. Earl, what do you want to do with this? Where is this going to be 10 years from now? 20 years from now 100 years from now in your family dynamics? And I just thought that was really and I thought that's how everybody practice law. So when I got out of law school, I always knew I wanted to do estate and tax work, so I didn't do that. chord I didn't do bar journal, any of those kinds of things. It was a waste of time, at least in my mind. I did the international taxation classes and, and so forth. But when I got out of law school, I could have worked with my grandpa, but I didn't like the nepotism, the feel of that, and it happens a lot within law firms. Right. It's McAllister Macalester McAllister, and McAllister right. But I wanted to kind of do my own thing. And so I joined a large law firm here in Salt Lake. They're actually now part of the largest law firm in the world. It's Denton, Sue has purchased them recently. But I was really surprised as I got into that firm, how they all did estate planning. It was a it was a trust meal, we call them, right, your client calls you or you get a referral into somebody. Before you meet with that client, ask them for a whole bunch of information, basically, what is their net worth? And how many kids do they have two and a half kids and a dog? And then you're going to tell them what they need to do. And I just thought that was totally bass ackwards. Right, I watched first, why why are we doing what we're doing? What is the impact it's going to make? And then let's choose the appropriate tools to get there. So what I think is unique in terms of how we practice is we really put the why before the what I spend tremendous amounts of time in the investment in the relationship. And one of the things that I love about what I do in terms of estate planning, it's really two things. Number one is I love attorney jokes, right? Because I feel like they're well earned, just hopefully not by me, hopefully, my, my clients are sleeping better at night. I'm not suing and making their life worse. And so they're very well earned. But I also love long term relationships. And estate planning is one of these things that's never done, might be up to date, but it can be out of date tomorrow. And it's not like I handle a litigation matter for you in the lawsuits over and we'll never talk again. And it's easier for people to come back to me and make changes to their estate planning. And I take that really seriously. And so I want that that strong investment into who they are, who their kids are, who the you know, their intended beneficiaries are going to be, but also who are they as a family, right? You asked me what makes me unique? Well, that's what I would ask a client, what makes you unique as a family. And families haven't really spent a lot of time in that if you think about it, they don't that's our first principle and entrusted. Right? The entrusted families, we call these people who have successfully navigated this wealth transfer from one generation to the next. Right, without creating trust fund babies. Well, we can't trust the fairings, right. One of the things that all of these families have in common is they know who they are, and what they believe. And so few families can articulate that. And remember, when I'm talking family here, that could mean a whole bunch of different dynamics from the standard husband and wife, two and a half kids to blended families to look you're single, but you still want to have an impact and what happens with the wealth that you have accumulated. So that's where I think we bring a much different angle to estate planning is really focusing on the family and their values and making sure that whatever plan is put in place takes that at heart.

Andrew Stotz 08:27
Interesting, a you reminded me of in the last years of my father's life, he and I went back to America and was with my mom and dad and my dad and I were in the car driving. And I wouldn't say that our family was a rich family, you know, at all? We did, they did okay, but and all the kids were completely independent, you know, so we weren't thinking about anything coming from our parents. But my father said, I asked him, What is the thing you're most proud about in your life? And he said that I build a trusting family. And wow, you know, like that hit me like, that would just really hit me because then I never really thought about it. Andrew and I spent most of my life you know, I had my mom and dad treated me very well, the they weren't abusive in any way. They weren't demanding, you know, they let me experience life. But there were times that there were, you know, non negotiables, like when I got involved with drugs and alcohol, and so really crashing, that they really stood up and said, you've got to deal with this. But I just think that is something that is powerful. So trust in trusting and all that and I think about also how money can destroy families. And part of the structures of what you do, tries maybe hopefully to prevent the collapsing in of a black hole into a black hole for a family that they never come out. No,

Andrew L. Howell 10:01
we have a saying in the estate planning world that you never truly know a person till you share an inheritance with them. Right. And I have seen the best families go through horrible fights. And I have seen, I have seen families that I thought for sure we're gonna fight just sell through it just without any kind of problems at all. And, and you never know what's going to happen. But you know, I, I don't, I'll disagree with you on something you said, which is that I don't think it's money that destroys families. And money is not good or bad. It just is. I mean, it can be used for good or bad just like anything else. In fact, in our book, we equate it to dynamite. Dynamite can be used to make roads and build tunnels or it can be used to kill people. And it's just the like, the question with money and dynamite is how much impact is ultimately going to make and it's going to make an impact. So I think unharnessed wealth and transfers, or undirected wealth and transfers that definitely can cause problems. I mean, what money will do is it will accentuate either you're good or you're bad qualities, right? If you're a philanthropic person, let's say altruistic generosity is one of your core values, and you get a bunch more money, well, you're probably going to give more to charity. If you though, have a situation like an early on in your life where you have a drug dependency problem or an alcohol dependency problem, and you get a bunch of money. Well, what's that going to do? It's going to exacerbate that problem, right. So it's, it's how that money is viewed. And, and really putting, instead of the money being the focus, you make the family, the focus, right? The second principle we talk about is that entrusted families prepare the next generation for the wealth, they don't just prepare the wealth for the next generation. And somewhere along the lines that has all gotten flipped, right? A trust, right? The name of trust, used to be sort of, you know, who was being entrusted, right? Who are we putting an interest for? And now all it boils down to is what is your balance sheet? How much money do you have in the bank? And I don't know where that happened. But somewhere in the last 100 120 years, it all got flipped on us. And I think that with what's going to be happening here in the near future, there's going to be what we call a $50 trillion tsunami $50 trillion, are going to change hands from one generation to the next, over the next 40 years. And if that, I mean, that's the largest wealth transfer in human history. And if that is unharnessed, like most estate plans are even if somebody has been right, most people don't 70% of the population never wants to speak to a bloodsucker like me about death and taxes. So they have a tendency to put it off. But even in the ones that I do see, there isn't any kind of mention of any of these things. It says When I die, it goes to my spouse, when my spouse dies, it goes equally to our kids. And when they're 25 years old, they get it all night, let's completely unharnessed and then they lose it in a divorce. They spend it whatever. So it's putting more thought, right really thinking of yourself as a steward over the assets, right? We can't take them with us. And how are we going to make sure that the next generation who are going to be the stewards are equipped to be able to handle it?

Andrew Stotz 13:33
Now I'm gonna have links in the show notes, too, to your books and your firm and stuff. But what would be what I want to just ask one last question in this intro section really is about you know, what's something that people can take away from, you know, I'm thinking about my audience is maybe 50% in the US 50% International. And for people as they look at, you know, the end of their life, estate planning, all that different stuff, what would be something that you would recommend, or that that you've learned, like one or two lessons that you've learned that I know, you have broken down in your books, and you go through in your probably in your website and stuff, but maybe you can share that? And then share where's the best place for people who think I need more of this should go?

Andrew L. Howell 14:25
Well, so I don't think the ideals that we talked about in the book, our border specific, right, I don't think that just because you live in, in Thailand or or Switzerland or wherever China, I don't think it matters I think we all are concerned about our kids, right? I would love to be able to look at my kids at my deathbed and think two things equally. That number one, I can leave them everything. And they're so fabulously responsible that they'd be able to manage it perfectly well and do a better job than I care. But I'd also love to look at my kids and think equally, I don't have to give you anything because you can make it on your own. My kids are not there yet. Right. So in terms of, of some things to think about, I think the book is a great resource, because it talks about, it really does lay out clear principles that I again, do not think are dependent upon us law or whatever. It's a deeper thinking into the family dynamic. Like as an example, as soon as we wrote and trusted this book that kind of talked about all these great ideas, people, they kind of liked it, which was weird for me, I thought two people were going to read it, my mom, maybe, and then my high school English teacher, just because she wouldn't believe that I ever wrote a book.

Andrew Stotz 15:47
But we haven't actually same experience.

Andrew L. Howell 15:51
But they've kind of had a good, good, good welcome. And we still sell a lot of them, which is again, surprising to me. But people are kind of left Honestly, after reading that book going. Well, that's great. Now what, right, where's the call to action. So we have a whole game that we've developed called rivets. The reason we use these word rivets and so forth is because in our book entrusted we analogize, sort of bridging the gap from one generation to the next. And bridges are held together with rivets. And these rivets are the values that hold the family together, right. And we feel there's these 44 positive values that really are embraced and we developed this whole, it's really a card trading game, where if you play it as a family, every member of the family winds up with their five core values. And you might say, Well, five values out of 44, everybody's going to have the same and no, there's 15 million different combinations of that. So and what's what's nice about that, as it starts the family discussion that I did, the first principle being found these know who they are and who and what they and what they believe, well, if I'm sitting down, and I'm playing this game with my family, and like one of my core values is is all honesty, okay. And I know that sounds really strange coming from a lawyer, but it's true. And the reason for that is early on in my life, there was a person in our family that was really dishonest with us. And it caused a lot of problems that didn't have to happen. And I now can sit down and play this game with my family, and be able to say, look, this is why honesty is so important to me. And my family is learning family lore, they're also understanding about me and my life experience. It's not me being preachy, that I'm not saying, you know, hey, Thomas, who's my oldest, you are so dishonest last week, and he shuts off listening, I'm telling him the story is why that's important. And then you think about that with every member of the family. And then as a family as a whole, you create those values. So I think that that's a great resource for families to really start talking deeper about what their ultimate goal is, with all this estate planning, rather than going into a lawyer's office like mine, and having that lawyer tell you what you are going to do. And that's what most of the time happens.

Andrew Stotz 18:12
Well, that's a lot of value there. And I think a lot of people kind of makes you want a date. Yeah, they, they kind of expect to just go into a lawyer's office, and they're going to tell them what to do. And this is sounds like you're about self discovery. And I could imagine if you were around the table, and everybody was identifying their core values, and you know, Grandpa says, honesty, and, you know, someone else says something else is a core value. And then you realize, Okay, three people at this table have honesty. And that's not even on my core values. Not interesting, what are my core values? And how, how did I form them? And are they you know,

Andrew L. Howell 18:51
you can play it in the reverse, right? You can play it with your family, and, like, I can sit down with my wife, and I can say, Candace, these are the five core values that I see in you. This is what I see in you, right. And they're going to be different than hers. And it's a such a powerful conversation to have. And then we'll play this and we have in many, many situations in the corporate setting. Right. I've played this with my team. I know what my paralegals and my administrative assistants, I know what their core values are. And so when I'm trying to divide up work, let's say I have a presentation that I need to do and one of my assistants is far more artistic than another one. Well, I'll probably help them or have them helped me design it. Right. Right. It's a it's kind of a personality test, if you will. But yeah, it's it's a fun thing that we're that we're working on.

Andrew Stotz 19:43
Well, it's great learning about what you're doing. And now it's time to show your worst investment ever and since no one goes into their worst investment thinking a will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

Andrew L. Howell 20:00
So this I think has a couple of lessons you can learn from. And I certainly have learned from it. But I love the quote that you had said before that a smart man learns from other people's mistakes. So I've loved that, quote, I'm gonna steal it. So backstory on this is it involves family members, okay, one pretty close family member other is a second cousin. And the second cousin is older and I'd grown up admired by I thought a lot of him very smart guy had gone to Stanford Law and seemed to be successful. So in kind of the 2005 2006 timeframe, when real estate is going gangbusters, right, everybody's making money hand over fist, I decided that rather than sticking it out, or, or not, I shouldn't say sticking it out. But sticking to what I'm good at, which is as a state planning lawyer, I'm going to dip my foot into the real estate game, I don't have anything against real estate, right? I want to make it really clear you guys that I'm not a financial advisor. And if I give you if I give you investment advice, you do the exact opposite of what I tell you, and you'll probably make a bunch of money. But I decided to get involved in this because this, this second cousin of mine, came and he said, Andrew, there's a building that is being built here, locally, here in Salt Lake. And I have the right to the bottom floor of this, this building. And why don't you and then this other family, a member of mine, come in with us. And what we'll do is we'll turn this, it was a large space into one of those office sharing arrangements, right where you can, you can have an office, and then you all share a conference room, and there's a receptionist and you have all your own phone lines, it's kind of the span of Office still. And so we did it. And we got a conventional loan through a bank that was then tapped on top of it with an SBA loan, taught me a whole nother whole scenario about, you know, Small Business Administration, it sounds so you know, non threatening, the SBA is the Treasury. Okay. It's a big gorilla. And so I learned my lesson the hard way on that one, we took out. We took out a, I think it was a $1.7 million loan to do some of the property purchase with it gets complicated there. But I was on the hook. In every sense of the degree, personally guaranteed to the SBA two, you name it, I was I'm on the hook, as are my two other partners. Now they knew I was busy right in the office, solving everybody's problems, right? That kind of a deal on that I'm not going to be actively involved in running this business, because it was a business, in addition to being a real estate ownership, right? You're, you're making money from renting out the space, and you're doing all this kind of stuff. But I wasn't going to be involved. And I made it I made it very clear. And I was expecting them to do what they had said, which is they would run the business. Okay. Again, a lot of you can probably see red flags coming along here. Well, we all know what happened. 2007 2008. But that's not what brought the downfall to this. The downfall was that we had zero marketing, we had zero. We had zero push for this whole project that we were working on. We had like 100 off. No, it wasn't that many, it was like 70 offices that we needed to run out. And we could never get it more than about 10% to 15% occupied. And we'd have these meetings on a monthly basis and it would just be hemorrhaging money. And you know, I even started running an office there because even though I didn't need it just to create an additional $1,000 of income every month going into the company. So every month I'm draining $1,000 out and I write it, we write it, write it, whatever. Finally my two partners throw up their hands and they say, well, we can't we can't cough up anymore. So if we're going to keep this thing going and or you need to cover it or we're just we're just going to throw our hands up and I said What do you mean, throw your hands up? Come to find out the second cousin of mine who I thought was so financially successful, doesn't own anything. Right. He's in debt up to his eyeballs, and he doesn't have any assets. And so he's basically saying I'm going to declare bankruptcy and you know, walk away from this thing. My other partner again another family member whose closer than the second cousin basically did the same thing. threw up his hands and said I don't you know, they can come after me for whatever we what they want, but I don't have that I don't have 1.7 million to come out. During, so I'm left holding the bag and the whole thing collapses all goes down the bank repossesses, whatever. And, and again, this is all happening 2008. And so everything's happening for everybody, which maybe was a blessing. In some ways, it kind of gave me some time to circle the wagons and I started in on this endeavor with the SBA mean, first of all, I went through an entire loss of a relationship, that second cousin of mine, he and I don't talk any longer, and probably never will. He'll, we will have some words if we ever do because we come to find out he was really dishonest about a couple of things. It caused issues with the other family member of mine, although not quite as much. But it caused a tremendous amount of sleepless nights. I mean, I, I was up for months and months and months going, how am I going to come up with $1.7 million. I'm seeing, you know, all the equity in my home being sucked away. I'm seeing my retirement accounts being sucked away. I'm getting these letters from again, the Treasury, right, the SBA, it's the Treasury. And they're they're saying, Look, we don't we don't have to take you to court, we'll just take all the money in your bank accounts. That's all we'll do. And you said, Okay, well, why don't I deal with this. And I had never even though I'm a tax attorney ever had to work with the SBA or the Treasury on an offer in compromise. Right? That's where you go, and you say, I can't pay 1.7 million, what will you take? And so it was trial by fire, I didn't have any money to pay my own lawyer to do it, right? See all my money go out the door. And so I took it on my, myself to negotiate that now. I'm happy to say that I was able to negotiate it to $70,000. I mean, I didn't have to pay 1.7, I was able to dramatically cut that down. Again, it was the times back then 2008. Everybody was trying to work out with the SBA. And the SBA was happy to get whatever they could. Nowadays, it's not quite so easy to get something like that in terms of a return. But that's what I was able to do. And I had to get $70,000 I had to sell a rental property that we had at the time, in order to come up with that $70,000. And that rental property nowadays would be worth twice what it was at that point in time. So it was a big, big, I mean, I wound up losing, probably total, because we put money into the deal. You know, as we were coming into it, I bet you I lost close to $300,000 on that deal, and then another 70,000 to the SBA. And I bet my partners, did they take about 100,000

Andrew Stotz 27:57
They take possession of the assets and stuff like, oh, yeah,

Andrew L. Howell 28:01
property was gone. Totally, you know, somebody else bought it for pennies on the dollar, condominium ized it's still a beautiful building, I drive past it all the time and give it the middle finger. Right. But it was just a reminder. Right, but I mean, the hardest part really, and all of that. I think money I think is comes and goes and yeah, you make bad investments and you, you lick your wounds, and you move on or hopefully you don't make them again, or like you say you learn and you don't do it. But the hardest part for me was the damage it took on my on the family dynamics. I mean, you'd have the same when mom was not happy, nobody's happy. But I think it applies to dad too. And dad was not happy during that time. And I was not a pleasant person to be around. I wasn't sleeping, it affected my job and my performance. I mean, I couldn't give presentations because I'm worried about where, you know, my assets are going and I think that unless you live through a true financial scare like that, where you see everything that you work so hard just going down the toilet. You can't really empathize empathize with somebody that's going through it and and if anything that was a blessing for me to be able to understand when plants go through those hardships exactly what it feels like.

Andrew Stotz 29:21
So how would you summarize the lessons that you learn?

Andrew L. Howell 29:26
Okay, my lessons on this. Don't get involved in a business that you are not willing to put your own time and effort into. Do not expect somebody to do what they've necessarily told you. And that kind of leads into the next one. Be very, very careful about partners. I always tell my clients don't bring partners into your life if you can avoid it. If you can do something on your own. It's so much easier because you don't have to look out for anybody else. As soon as you bring a partner into your life. You now owe them a fee. A duty of loyalty and a duty of care. And that's, that's a whole different realm of the law that you want to completely avoid. And I always tell clients, if you get involved in a business with a partner, you treat it as seriously as a marriage. And I mean that because 50% of marriages are going to make it but 100% of the time that partnership is going to fail. So be very careful about partners, I've also said, Look, don't get involved in the business that you're not really passionate about, I wasn't really passionate about this executive office running thing, I just thought it was going to be a good return. And I would sit back and collect a check. I think you should avoid if you can try and getting involved with family. I really do. I mean, I have a lot of family stuff together. My mom and my sister and myself that are really, really close, and we work really well together. But I don't think I would get in business with any other family member again, It's too big of a risk, you not only lose the investment, you not only cause the business issues that go along with that, but you lose a family relationship, right. And there's certain we're all juggling these balls in life. And some of the balls are made of glass. And if you drop them, they break. And to me, that's family and families foremost, and I hate that kind of dynamic. So those are some of the things that I've learned. You know, I, my grandpa had this great saying that it's always the most important thing is the return of your investment, rather than the return on your investment. And I think I lost track of that. Chasing the almighty interest.

Andrew Stotz 31:34
So I wrote down a lot of things here. And I have some lessons that I learned from your story. Maybe I'll summarize some of them. The first one is, there's that great book by Simon Sinek called Start with Why. And it talks about like, what, what's your why? But you just you just actually did a little differently. You said what's the client's why. And that is, you know, a great thing for all of us to think about. Because it's not just what your why, you know, yeah, we want to come up with a great WHY and we want the clients to get on board with that, why. But if you pay attention to your clients, why, then you really, really, you're making a difference. The second thing that I wrote down is stay away from sexy money making opportunities. You know, like, when people come to you with things, I always say to people, one, one rule that I tried to tell people is just just follow this one rule, and you're probably save yourself a lot. Never invest in anything that someone brings to you.

Andrew L. Howell 32:41
I could I tell you, I would agree I, I've never, I've never seen anybody make a whole bunch of money on one of these deals. Unless they're one of the insiders, right? I've seen them make a whole bunch of money on it.

Andrew Stotz 32:53
So if somebody's bringing it, now you go, and how am I supposed to find? Well, that's the whole point. It's your job to try to figure out what I want to do and where I can make an impact, and then do your research on that. So the next thing is sales and marketing is hard. And revenue, you know, business starts with revenue. Without revenue, you'll never have profit. And most people just think that revenue comes but it doesn't. It's extremely hard. You can go to school and study finances, I did finances easy compared to driving revenue. And that's a lesson that I know and I've learned, but you reinforce. And also, another thing I wrote down is something that I say in one of my books is that you first of all, you've got to figure out how to to create wealth in your life, you've got to make sure that your incoming is much higher than your outgoing. Now, whether that's cash flow in a business, or whether that's a salary you're getting every month versus what you spent. So the first way that you can create wealth is to significantly reduce your costs. However, no one gets rich cutting costs. Because it has a limit, you can only go so far. And then you're back to revenue. And you're thinking holy crap, you know, I've cut down everything I possibly can, but we're still losing. It's back to revenue. And the other thing I wrote down is, you know, beware of outward appearances. Everybody is putting up, you know, why do people put on suits to make an outward appearance? You know, and everybody wore

Andrew L. Howell 34:43
a suit every day in my life for 15 years and I don't wear things like that a quarter.

Andrew Stotz 34:47
Yeah, we make an outward appearance. Now hopefully, obviously there's congruence between what we're projecting to the world and what's inside but come on, look at it

Andrew L. Howell 34:57
as getting less and less. I mean, Instagram and Facebook, I mean, come on who's Yeah, everybody's on the beach hand in hand and everything, you know, it's hunky dory. And I can tell you personally after representing 1000s of clients over 20 years, that that is not the case, there is usually stuff going on behind closed doors. So I'm with you that, that, that this idea of, of, we're gonna portray everything out there to the rest of the world in a different light than who we really are. Right? What do you what do they say? I wish I was the person my dog thinks I am. Right.

Andrew Stotz 35:31
Okay, that's a good one. The other thing that I was thinking about is a saying that my counselor, one of my great counselors, when I was in drug rehab, basically, and he was episode number eight of this podcast. Now we're at about 600. And Mike mattoni, said to me, don't compare your insides to other people's outsides, because we see everything that's messed up with ourselves. And when we look at the appearances out there, we see that everybody's got it together, but they don't. And I'd say, after, you know, decades on this earth, I've come to the conclusion that everybody's messed up. Everybody's messed up.

Andrew L. Howell 36:18
Absolutely. Nobody knows what the hell they're doing. We're just all winging it. And I took this, I took this mental age test this like, online thing that my wife sends me, apparently, I'm 19 years old. That's what I that's my mental adulthood, right? I'm 19 years old. So that's great. I get to identify as a 19 year old, wonderful for me, right? I don't want to grow up, though. Who wants to grow up?

Andrew Stotz 36:41
Yeah. But the outward appearances thing, as you say, about Facebook and Instagram and the things that we see, actually, we don't have to go to the metaverse, we are in it already. And that is the projection of people's image on social media is projecting a Metaverse type of image that they create and construct as they want it to be. I mean, I put up the best picture I put up on, you know, that I have on Instagram or whatever, like the, this is a good one. Okay, here, I took a bunch of pictures this weekend. But this is the best, you know, that's what we're actually going to put

Andrew L. Howell 37:21
it I go one step further I edited, right, make make the sunset look brighter, and they do the con get rid doesn't wrinkles. Absolutely,

Andrew Stotz 37:30
there's two last things that I took away. And that is the cost of energy, the cost, that the consumption of your personal energy, when you get caught up into a worst investment type of situation, the cost of the energy that you're, you're having to allocate to that thing is massively destructive in your life, whether that's keeping you up at night, whether it's loud, you're not able to focus, you know, all the emotions that go with it. And so really, you've got to try to get out of you got to try not to get into these types of situations. And when you feel that draining energy, you know, you've got to say, and I like you know, many years ago, someone told me, halt, never get too hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. But when you see these things building, you got to try to get out, you've got to try to go for resolution, because you only have a certain amount of energy. And if you destroy it through something like that, and the world will suck that energy out of you. They don't care. And so protect your energy. And my final thing is empathy. And last, I want to wrap this up by just saying that the whole point of my podcast is authenticity, and empathy. You know, you use that word, and I'm using it here by saying that, when you've been through a really horrific experience, as we all have, and you've shared it, you've been open about it. You're the type of person I want to work with. Anything you would add to my summary that I took away from what you said,

Andrew L. Howell 39:13
No, I like it. I you know, you see a lot of angles that I don't necessarily I wasn't perceiving but I totally agree with everything that you say. Yeah, I we're all we're all just doing the best we can and I do believe that. But why do people do better than some? And I think that it's because of, of living a purposeful life being in whatever you decide that you're going to do. Right? be purposeful in it. Nobody's going to do it for you. And yeah, and then, you know, some of the generational shifts now and how various generations are looking at that issue and feelings of entitlement In, you know what a true equality is that equality of opportunity as equality of outcome, and how that's all changing in terms of our previous generations looked at that? And how do you kind of battle against those changing things, those changes in thought, but anyway,

Andrew Stotz 40:19
why people why people are successful, and I would say, particularly my podcast listeners, is because they apply risk management principles, because I'm telling you, if you don't, you know, if you don't apply basic risk management principles that our parents teach us, or society teaches us, you're going to expose yourself to risks that you could have avoided. And that's just like in investing, if you take on, if you go out and buy one stock, and one stock only, you have taken on a high level of risk that you could have diversified. And the world doesn't reward you for taking on that risk. There is no additional compensation for that. So reduction in risk is such an underrated thing. Whether that's walking along the street, whether that's driving your car, whether that's starting relationships, friendships, businesses, you should be thinking about, how do I apply basic principles to make sure I've reduced my risks now? So

Andrew L. Howell 41:23
I want to say kindred spirits with you on that one as well. In fact, that's another one of our chapters in our book, which is in trusted families preserve and protect wealth, without question. So no, I'm 100%, in line with you on that one.

Andrew Stotz 41:37
Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned about that shifting society. And one of the revelations I've had said, you know, first of all, I've realized that most people don't know what they're talking about. And most people have not done a considerable amount of research about what they're talking about, what are the implications if we went this direction, a great example is Germany. I mean, Germany is absolutely screwed, because they went green. And it turns out, after 10 years of going green, it was not going to be enough to support the energy needs of the country. And that was like a wake up call for me. And then the second thing that I've learned is that there is a, I would say, I would call it a political strategy, or maybe just a strategy, that some people try to get what they want, through chaos and confusion. And if you can deliver a lot of chaos and confusion to people that what does that word mean? Now, what am I supposed to say, now? How does this Okay, yeah, everybody can do anything they want. And I'm okay, you know, like, all of these things about what words mean? What things mean, if you can just cause a lot of chaos and confusion in people's heads, then you can disorient them, and you can, they can get lost. And so part of risk management to me is Stop, stop when something's confusing, chaotic, doesn't seem to make sense and stuff stop because someone may be purposely doing that. And so, you know, risk management can go across a lot of lines, but one of the biggest risk management is how do we protect our mind from not being overwhelmed by whatever societies and advertisers and politicians and political movements want you know, from our mind, and I'm not going to give it

Andrew L. Howell 43:28
it's it's increasingly difficult to right it's to do that but no, I mean, interesting,

Andrew Stotz 43:36
really, Thailand is a very nice place when I see the following through its turmoil. So based on what you learned from this story and what you continue to learn what one action let's go back in time these guys come to you and say oh, we got this great opportunity right what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate

Andrew L. Howell 43:59
Well, I mean, the obvious answer right is you say no, I mean the Nancy Reagan just say no, but I will tell you this I would say no to that exact same scenario at this point in time knowing what I know now and you could do it for a number of different reasons. I could have blamed it on a couple of things at that point in time I could have said I don't have the finances available to do something like that. And you know, play the poverty ticket instead I'm using you know, my ego is no I can I can come up with the money and be a big player in this. So I would I again, proceed with caution. I would totally have turned it down. If it were presented to me today.

Andrew Stotz 44:43
I've got an idea. Hold on. I've taken the book. Start with Why I, and I think I've gotten, I've gotten a new title for a book about your experience. No. I like it. Start with no, yeah, no, actually 85% of businesses fail within the first five years. So I think I'll start with no.

Andrew L. Howell 45:20
Yeah. So I, I'm with you. And that's how I truly feel that way that the investments that I make right now, in terms of where the vast majority of my disposable income goes, it's not going to it goes to books that we're writing, we have software we're developing, to deal with all of this stuff that we're extremely passionate about. And so I, you know, I have every intention of saying no to, you know, great ideas. I mean, Utah, if you may not be aware of this, but Utah is the, the fraud capital of the United States. I mean, the more Ponzi schemes are in Utah, or have been in Utah than any other state, the Wild West. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's because we live in this a fairly patriarchal society, you know, we've we've got a fairly strong religious presence here within Utah, and everybody traces trusts each other, right? If your neighbor is a member of your same church, or whatever, you're going to trust them. And, and it really is worked to their detriment. So no, I'm a big fan of just saying no.

Andrew Stotz 46:33
Got it. So I would know, what is a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Andrew L. Howell 46:40
Again, I think if they want to learn kind of more about how this gets deeper into the family dynamics, the book would be a great resource riveted, which is the second book is actually more enjoyable. By the way, they're both on Audible. First one I read, so you have to listen to my horrible voice. But I have a client of mine, that's an Emmy Award winning voice actress, and she read the second one. And that's really, that's a cool book, because it goes through each of those 44 values. And it tells a story of a historical figure that exemplified one of those values. And we tried to use people that were kind of out of the norm. So I think those are great resources to kind of the deeper the discussion within the family about who they are, what they believe, what are they really trying to pass on, beyond the finances?

Andrew Stotz 47:30
Great. Last question. What is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Andrew L. Howell 47:36
So our number Well, my number one goal was put it that way I, as I mentioned, we're really developing this whole process for families to go through, we've now had 2000 People go through our interested process, we're putting some lot of money into software to be able to do some online things instead of having it to be so personal within clients, because so many people want to have this discussion. And our goal here, and we've got some written, we already have about six, five or six really good relationships. But I hope 12 months from now, I can say to you that we have created in essence, a company in and of itself that is just doing this. It's not a complimentary to our legal practice. But it's a company that is really concentrating on on families and businesses and groups and teams, getting real clear about what they're ultimately trying to accomplish, what their values are, I'd love to make an impact on that, that wealth transfer that $50 trillion tsunami, so it isn't so unharnessed that there is some direction to it.

Andrew Stotz 48:42
Beautiful, well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet joined the become a better investor community just go to MyWorstInvestmentEver.com right now to claim your spot. As we conclude, Andrew, I want to thank you again for joining our mission and on behalf of A. Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Andrew L. Howell 49:12
No, no grand ideas. I just really appreciate the opportunity to come on. And you know, you guys want to hear me talk. Usually, my wife pays me to not talk so I'm happy to do it.

Andrew Stotz 49:23
Do you will take it we got a lot from it. And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our wealth fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside.