He Got Everything He Wanted. Then Realized He Wasn’t Free. | Garrett White

The Determined Society with Shawn French | Adversity & Mindset

Garrett White shares his vulnerable journey from a high-flying real estate and mortgage career to a total personal and financial collapse du

Key takeaways

• Garrett White experienced a total collapse in 2008 involving his money, businesses, and marriage.
• He distinguishes between being a true entrepreneur and a 'hired hitman' who simply knows how to sell aggressively.

Main topics

• Identity and Character Building
• Financial Crisis and Recovery

Notable quotes

Freedom is not about having anything. Freedom is a way of being.

Conclusion

A profound reflection on the emptiness of material accumulation and th

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) There was no more money that could fill this hole. But the biggest lie was to myself. And that was that I was happy. And Speaker 1 (0:06) I wasn't. What does freedom look like to you? That's why freedom is not about having anything. Freedom is a way of being. Speaker 2 (0:12) I Speaker 1 (0:13) know what it means to have it all. And not be free. Speaker 2 (0:16) Never once had I considered it. In all these times and all these events. that I should ever experience peace. Speaker 1 (0:24) Everybody wants to run from the pain, but they don't realize that the pain is where you grow into the person that can do the impossible shit that you couldn't do 10 years ago. The Speaker 2 (0:34) idea of waking up the beginning of 2026 with the idea that I want peace, there's a big piece in my mind that's like, you pussy, what Speaker 1 (0:44) do you Speaker 2 (0:44) mean you Speaker 1 (0:44) want peace? We don't do peace. You've trained so many men to have it all. Meanwhile, you're Speaker 2 (0:54) fucking crumbling. Like how does a warlord who's been at war his whole life, how do I let go? How do I do it without destroying everything? The pressure of life, the pressure is so intense. And in this place, you can choose to go to collapse or you can do the hardest one, which is choose to contract. Speaker 2 (1:28) By Speaker 1 (1:28) the time he was 30, Garrett White had built a fortune in mortgages and real estate. He was running Ironmans and 100-mile races on the side. And in 2008, took it all. The money, the businesses, his marriage, all underwater at one time. Most people, when they hit that rock bottom, ask how they can be more comfortable. He asked a different question. He asked, how can he be the strongest possible human being in every area in his life? And that answer led him to a system that has trained over 70,000 men. He is a founder of Wake Up Warrior and creator of Warrior Week. I have with me today Garrett White. Welcome to the Determined Society, brother. Welcome, welcome, welcome yourself, man. Thank you for putting this Speaker 2 (2:12) together. And I have to agree with everybody that comes on this show with the fact that you nailed the intro. Speaker 1 (2:18) You heard that rumor. You nailed the intro. I heard it. I watched it. Yeah. Yeah, man. Nailed the intro. You know, it's one of the things that I always really take pride in, but always kind of mess up at times because it's so important. You want to give the guests their flowers and everything, man, especially you. You know, I've been following you ever since I started this journey about six years ago, and it's just been such a blessing to see your stuff come up on the feed. And, you know, really. showing me what a man is really supposed to be like and how they're supposed to operate in their lives. Speaker 2 (2:49) It's an interesting question. What is a man? It's loaded, Speaker 1 (2:53) isn't it? Yeah. Speaker 2 (2:54) I know when I started down that path, I was talking about during my collapse in 08, which I think back to it now, I'm like, dude, it was so long ago. There's still guys living off that story. Some of my dudes had only made money doing mortgages. You're like, everybody made money doing mortgages, dude. We were retards. We were just aggressive dudes that could sell. Speaker 1 (3:13) That's it. Speaker 2 (3:13) And you got exposed real quick that you weren't an entrepreneur, which I wasn't. I called myself an entrepreneur. I had a lot of people around me, but I didn't know anything about running a company. I knew how to sell. That's it. And we were in an industry where if you could sell and you could talk and you were aggressive and you could hustle, you could make money. And the minute the game shifted, we found out who the real entrepreneurs were and we found out the ones that weren't. And all the hired hitmen like me. Speaker 1 (3:37) Gone. Gone. You know, it's funny because I've heard Sergio, which is one of your guys, say, if you're a real estate agent, a mortgage broker, you are not a business owner. You are not an entrepreneur. It is not your product. You're selling something of someone else's. And it resonated with me, man. And to your point. Speaker 1 (4:01) 2007 and 2008, we did a lot of people like me out that were just doing it because it was the way to make money. But I found out really damn quickly, I wasn't cut out for that shit, man. Just wasn't due. But let's go back. Let's go back to childhood. By the time you were in middle school, you had moved six times. So how does a young man that's always the new kid first realize that he can be anybody he wanted to be and then go be that person? Speaker 2 (4:28) I just built a character. I found out right now it was sports. It was the only thing that got attention quickly. From the first crack of a bat in the league. I remember when it happened. My mom somehow back in the day took the photo of my first in the park home run. Back in the day, like captured this shot. I have this picture with me in the little red uniform and a bat, orange Louvre, little slugger bat, metal one. She somehow caught the hit with the ball only two feet off the bat. Speaker 1 (4:55) That Speaker 2 (4:55) moment, though, started a whole trend of building characters. I'm not even saying it's healthy. I'm saying we all do it. And I built a character, which was I could fit in immediately in sports. If you were the most aggressive, violent, and you played football, no matter where I went, I immediately had friends. I immediately had enemies. I immediately had attention of girls. And so sports became my drug. It's the only thing that mattered to me. Play, play, play. Too white, too slow. Played at Boise State. Played in the Arena Leagues. Just never got there. But that was a vision. Everything for me became character. The only way I could survive the movement, the place, the trailer homes, everything I was in was just sports. That's it. I grew up in Stockton. You play football, you play. That's it. You had a pathway. Immediate friends, no matter where you went. They weren't real friends. But you got attention, and attention became my drug. Speaker 1 (5:43) Wait a second, back up. Where did you grow up? Speaker 2 (5:45) Stockton. California. I Speaker 1 (5:47) grew up in Concord. Speaker 2 (5:48) Now what? Speaker 1 (5:48) I swear, this is freaking wild, dude. Yeah. were from the same area. So what high school did you go to? Speaker 2 (5:54) I ended up moving to Washington High School. So I was a Pacific Junior High, or Lincoln Junior High School, right across the street from Lincoln High School. I would have gone to Lincoln. We moved to Central Washington for my high school. Speaker 1 (6:04) Dude, that's freaking insane, dude. Stockton, wow. You mentioned character, Speaker 2 (6:09) and Speaker 1 (6:10) I can relate to that because I was Sean French, the baseball player. I played baseball at LSU. That was my identity. What was it like for you when all of a sudden the one thing you were built for in sports, like football, was taken from you? What did that identity shift look like? Speaker 2 (6:25) It was easy. I was sitting at a championship game arena football. I was on the sideline. I'm looking around at 10,000 people screaming. I'm playing ball. I'm not good enough to go to the league. Too slow. And I had a moment. I was like, I'm done. Like I said, like I'm done. I'm sitting at halftime looking around like I'm done. This is not, there's nothing here for me anymore. But then you're lost. But it's the same thing I went through in the first round of my companies and mortgages. You lose. All I knew how to do was make money selling mortgages. I wasn't, I was a pitch man. I was a wholesaler. Now I played entrepreneur, read Rich Dad Pornhatch like everybody else and it inspired me to go pursue money. So my addiction to sports, my identity in sports became an identity in money. Okay, well if I can't make it this way, then I'll just do money. And money became a god. Just like sports have been a god. Like, who am I in this transition? Everybody's shit then. And this is happening right now. AI is destroying the game the way that most entrepreneurs experience it. And all wholesalers and real estate, et cetera, we're watching this thing is decimating entire industries, vertical, shifting the way that we look at life. I believe God sent this. My experience is it's not here on accident. We've gotten off course as human beings. We have no idea what the hell we're doing. We become addicted to consumption. We become addicted to dealing with this game of illusions every single day. It happens in marriage. It happens in business. It happens in life. We built these characters and the universe is shaking this shit. I say, hey, are you going to wake up to the truth of what you're here for? Or you're just going to be man whores. You're going to be money whores. You're going to be addicted to all these things that in the end never, ever satisfy. You can't get enough of them. Speaker 1 (8:05) It's interesting because, I mean, we can talk about AI and what it's doing to our world all day long. And it is actually scary. It is actually scary what it's doing. But before we get into all that, I want to go back to that moment. You said you were lost. You knew you were done. For that moment for me was 2003 in right field corner, College World Series. We got beat twice. We two in barbecue. We were going home and everybody was crying. So was I. They were crying because the season was over. We didn't get to play with each other anymore. Ever again. I was decimated because I didn't know who the fuck I was anymore. Yeah. How did you find yourself? I didn't, man. Speaker 2 (8:47) I remember sitting in the back of the bus and boys were partying, going to strip club after the game. I'm reading Rashad Porter out in the back seat. I was sitting on the bus, reading this book in the back. Everybody's hammered, bringing girls back. I wasn't interested in any of it. I was like, I gotta find something else. But I had a moment reading Rich Dad Porter like so many entrepreneurs. That's how I ended up in real estate too. Not because I knew anything about real estate or even cared about it. It's just that's what Robert Kiyosaki talked about. Speaker 1 (9:13) Sorry, Speaker 2 (9:13) I'm reading this book. I'm so grateful that he had marketing skills and he had sales skills and he had author skills and he was willing to publish a book because the book itself completely transformed me. I didn't read anything in college. Maybe you read. I didn't read anything. I read five books and I graduated from college total. I didn't give a shit. And there I'm reading this book and a new world opened up to me. Like a possibility. I was like, you could be rich and not be an athlete. Like how, how do you do this? I didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family. There was nobody that had any money in my family. There was no one knew anything in any direction. I knew anybody that did it. The only people I knew were guys who made it in sports. Even then, I didn't really know. Speaker 1 (9:51) All right. A quick word from today's sponsor, Scribe. Here's the thing about scaling a team. It's never really about headcount or budget. It's that nobody documents anything because writing it all down is painful and nobody has time for it. So people end up doing the same process five different ways. And when someone leaves, all that knowledge just walks out the door with them. I've lived this. Every time I bring someone new onto the team, I'm re-explaining the same steps I've already explained a dozen times. That's exactly the problem Scribe was built to fix. Here's how it works. You turn on the extension or desktop app and just do the process like you normally would. Scribe builds the guide as you go, capturing every click and screenshot automatically. What used to take hours of writing and cleanup is done in under a minute, and it's already ready to share. It also... Auto-redacts sensitive stuff, names, account numbers, emails out of every screenshot. If you're running a team, you can enforce that company-wide so nothing slips through. And once the guide exists, anyone can launch real-time on-screen guidance that shows them exactly where to click, step-by-step, inside the actual tool. Plus... Scribe doesn't just document your workflow. It actually suggests ways to improve it, like cutting redundant steps or flagging what could be simplified. To see what Scribe could look like for your org, head to scribe.how.tds and mention TDS for your first month of Scribe capture free on select plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E.how.tds. Speaker 2 (11:31) And so there was a moment of shift. And this pivot that happens inside of all of us, there's a moment where your consciousness wakes up to a reality inside of you that was not fundamentally available to you before. And you see something about what's possible in you. And we use the outside things around us to pull us forward. For us, sports, for you, me, sports was one of those hooks. It allowed us to see a piece of us. That's why anybody that hasn't played team sports at a high level doesn't get it. Speaker 1 (11:59) No. It's a different game, man. It's different. It's a different game. You know, you can go to high school. You can go to high school and play. You can even play at a smaller school in college, and you won't have the experience of a bigger or even a mid-major collegiate program. It's a different vibe, man. And everything is lost when that is over. But I want to go dig into that moment when you shifted, when you read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Because I think there's a huge epidemic that goes on. Everybody reads something. Everybody gets this motivation and they fucking hate that word. I used to rely on it. I used to rely on the YouTube video to get me pumped up to go sell payroll and HR. I needed it. But then I realized, man, I need to lay on discipline. I need to lay on a process. and activity and do that every fucking day and not worry about what the scoreboard says, right? Because the middle is the gift. Yeah. But when you shifted, were there any thoughts in your mind? Cause there's someone listening right now. It's going, you know, I have this idea and I want to do this, but I'm afraid I don't have what I need. I don't have X. I don't have Y. I don't have Z. And they sit there and they wait and they sit there miserable. What would you tell them? Speaker 2 (13:10) Wow. Speaker 1 (13:14) Here's a Speaker 2 (13:15) challenge. Like, no matter what the ideas you get, you want to pivot something in your marriage. You want to pivot something in money. You want to pivot something with your body. And I call it a pivot because you're on a trajectory. You're going a certain direction. You have momentum going that direction. That momentum is encouraging everything around you, the people that you run with, the situations you're in, the home you live in, is encouraging you to stay on that path. Like you are going to stay on this default path, even if it's leading you to hell, even if it's leading you to a place that does not work. And there's a moment where the pivot opens up and there's this idea that you could be something else, but it is impossible. This destination you see, that's why we live in a world on cell phones. You can see everything around you comparing to yourself. No matter who you are, there is someone more jacked. There is somebody with more money. There's somebody with a hotter wife, with better tits. There's something going on perpetually telling you you're not enough. And so there's this thing that opens up, and we see this impossibility out in front of us that we couldn't see from where we were before. But then seeing that place is this massive gap. I call it the impossible game because it is fundamentally impossible. Who you are right now running this show, impossible 10 years ago. Oh, dude. Impossible six years ago, yet here you are because you made decision after decision after decision to pursue what was impossible by doing the simple possible shit required every single day to get there. But this is hard because people don't want to work. They don't want to hurt. They don't want to suffer to make the decision. So it's a lot easier to make love to the idea. Speaker 1 (14:48) Make love to the idea. Yeah. Geez. You know, because when you do something, there's a lot of pain involved. I don't give a shit what it is. Speaker 2 (14:58) If Speaker 1 (14:59) you're transforming your body, it hurts. Physically, you wake up in the morning, you're in pain. Intralift, you're in pain because you're weak, right? And there's financial pain too. There's so much pain involved and everybody wants to run from the pain, but they don't realize that the pain is where you grow into the person that can do the impossible shit that you couldn't do 10 years ago. Did you have any moments like that that you had to sit with yourself and go, you know what? I got to be honest with me. This is where I'm struggling and this is what I need to do.