Intro
Christopher Mackin, a wealth advisor of two decades who left the business, explains why he walked away, what a 10-day silent meditation retreat in India produced, how he thinks childhood wires a person's relationship with money, and what he expects the coming inheritance wave to be spent on. The host brings his own money history, his trouble sitting still, and a question about roughly $80 trillion changing hands.
Guest: Christopher Mackin, wealth advisor to visionary leaders for 20 years and author of True Wellth
Published: 28 August 2026 on Founder's Story
Show notes | 28 min
Key Takeaways
Money is not a limited resource, it is a continually expanding one
"it's not a limited resource. It's continually expanding" — Mackin
He says the gap most people carry is between what they can access and what they believe they need
He left the business because it was making him smaller, not because he regrets it
"I don't think I got the scoreboard wrong" — Mackin
The people who build the most are the ones least attached to the money
"I don't care if it's going to bankrupt me or I'm going to run out of it at some point in time" — Mackin, on the builder's mindset
Financial fear is almost never about money once you follow it down
"most often people are just afraid of death" — Mackin
A 10-day Vipassana in India produced the instruction to write the book
"It was the hardest thing I've ever done mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually" — Mackin
Childhood money scenes become adult operating patterns, and awareness is what converts them into a choice
Mackin traces his own to his parents arguing about money and the beat-up family car
Health belongs inside any honest definition of wealth
"Health is wealth at the end of the day" — Mackin
Silence, not analysis, is where he says the patterns become visible
He meditates about an hour each morning and does a full body scan
Inheritors will move money more freely than their parents did, because the tax friction is far lower
Low cost bases keep current holders frozen; a step in generation removes the excuse
Some of that capital gets redirected out of default index exposure and into companies the owner actually believes in
Why He Walked Away From 20 Years of Advising the Wealthy
Mackin cannot give a single clean reason for leaving, and says so: "I can't tell you why I walked away from it at the moment outside of feeling a call to something greater" — Mackin
He describes accumulating evidence of resistance after two decades — things that were not working the way he had envisioned them
The clearest reason he does give is about size: "Staying in the business that I was in was keeping me small and limiting my ability to really expand and create the impact that I was meant to create while I'm on this planet" — Mackin
The host frames it as people building the exact life they were supposed to want and then quietly suspecting they got the scoreboard wrong, and asks when Mackin suspected it
Mackin rejects the premise rather than answering it: "I don't think I got the scoreboard wrong" — Mackin. He says people evolve, that he owns every decision he made, and that he does not regret any of it
His definition of a wealthy life has three parts: looking within and appreciating what you have, doing what you enjoy, and balancing the doing against the being while giving back to community
Money as an Expanding Resource, Not a Fixed One
The biggest misconception about money, in his answer, is that it is limited: "it's not a limited resource. It's continually expanding" — Mackin
He says the people he meets carry an imbalance between what they have access to and what they believe they need
His counter is supply-side: money is being created every day, the systems were built with an increasing supply, and everyone is meant to have access to some share of it
He frames the individual claim as a personal ceiling rather than a fixed pie — everyone's "highest timeline" of what share of existing wealth they can reach
Why Some People Reach "Uber Levels of Success" and Others Don't
Mackin says the question is not specific to money and reaches for musicians as the parallel — some reach the top and others do not, regardless of profession
"there's subtle differences between people that reach uber levels of success and those that don't" — Mackin
He names a book on the subject with visible hesitation, landing on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers
The split he draws is between people who make money the focus and people who make the thing the focus: the second group says "I don't care if it's going to bankrupt me or I'm going to run out of it at some point in time" — Mackin
His stated mechanism is reciprocity: "the less attachment that we have to things, the more things comes into our field in terms of reciprocity of opportunity" — Mackin
Whether People Would Actually Trade Money for Fulfillment
The host bets that most people, sadly, would choose more money and less fulfillment
Mackin's answer starts from financial precarity: "When we poll the population, I would say in general, over 50% don't have three months of living expenses" — Mackin, who says that produces a feeling of not being safe
He claims the comfort threshold differs by gender: "Women look for more comfort than men do in terms of safety" — Mackin
The wealthy ones he has asked give the opposite answer to the one the host predicts: "I've asked a lot of people who have a significant amount of money who aren't fulfilled, and they say they'd rather be fulfilled than have all the money" — Mackin
He thinks people without resources would choose fulfillment too if they were connected to their truth, but adds the caveat himself — "what their actions are in the real world might dictate something differently" — Mackin
The 10-Day Silent Retreat in India
Mackin did a Vipassana, a 10-day silent meditation retreat, in India about three and a half years ago
"It was the hardest thing I've ever done mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually" — Mackin
The physical cost he describes is specific: sitting cross-legged for 10 hours a day, pain in his hips and his back, and a running mental struggle to stay still
What he calls a breakdown is the part he credits: breaking down and surrendering, he says, opens a channel to receive
What he received was an instruction, not an insight: "the message was write this book and what you're meant to create will come" — Mackin. The book was published a few weeks before the conversation
The host says he has done a retreat in Central America but never in India, and that his wife tells him constantly that he needs to be silent
What an Hour of Silence Every Morning Is For
Mackin sits in silence every morning, meditating about an hour, sometimes a little more or less. He has since done another 10-day Vipassana in Thailand
"sitting in silence as an observer allows us to explore and identify where there's patterns, behaviors that are not serving us" — Mackin
He describes a daily body scan, moving through each area of the body and registering what that part is experiencing
What he says it produces: a deeper connection with self, greater awareness, and energy moved through the body
Following the Fear Down Until It Stops
The host volunteers his own problem rather than asking about it: he gets trapped in his thoughts, wants to distract himself, and says of stress, "It's a rabbit hole"
Mackin answers with questions instead of advice, asking what happens next at every step until the host concludes that eventually nothing happens and the whole thing was irrational
He applies the same ladder to the retreat: letting go of attachment to the pain dissolves it, and letting go of judging the thoughts makes the thoughts go away. He is careful that the pain does not completely disappear, at least in his experience so far
Run the money version far enough and it terminates in the same place: "most often people are just afraid of death" — Mackin
His resolution is acceptance rather than management: "we're all in the game of life. Really just here to connect, live in our truth, live in our hearts, and play" — Mackin
How Childhood Wires a Relationship With Money
Mackin widens the host's question — childhood does not just set the relationship with money, it sets how a person shows up in every aspect of life
"When we're young, particularly in the first several years of life, we're just sponges" — Mackin, on absorbing energy, sounds, colors and experiences and converting them into meaning
He offers his own scene when the host asks for it: his parents fighting about money, and the story he built around it — few family trips, a car more beat up than everyone else's
He notes what he filtered out at the time. The house backed onto something, sat on a quiet cul-de-sac, and none of that registered; he focused on what was wrong or off
The conclusion he drew as a child had a cost: "I created this whole story about that my parents needed help and I needed to step up and take care of them at a very young age" — Mackin, who then let go of the sports and activities that brought him joy and started to work
He says people in their 40s through their 70s, including very successful ones, keep recognizing these patterns late
Awareness is what converts a pattern into a decision: "When you recognize a pattern that you have and you show up to that pattern with awareness, you now have a choice" — Mackin
Wealth Against "Wellth"
The host asks the spelling question directly: "What is the difference between wealth and what you call wellth, which I guess is spelled W-E-L-L-T-H?"
Mackin's version is experiential: joyful, abundant, expansive, doing what your heart says you are meant to do
The same three-part structure returns — the doing balanced against the being, plus giving back to community
He insists the measure is the full spectrum of a life rather than a bank balance, which is the distinction the alternate spelling is carrying
Health, Consumption and Whether Business Can Serve Humanity
The host says he is not always sure humanity is going in the right direction, and wonders whether we ever learn our lessons
Mackin's answer is that the question is already settled: "We're already there. There's people doing it," and he says the share of the population creating that way is growing
His indictment is about consumption: "We're killing ourselves in a variety of different ways through consuming some of the food that we consume and using pesticides and all these chemicals that cause poor health" — Mackin
"Health is wealth at the end of the day" — Mackin, who argues that what you put in your body subtracts directly from the life you are trying to live
The second problem he names is competition among people disconnected from how interconnected everyone is
His trajectory is still upward: people changing the belief systems and patterns they were brought up on
What Changed Between Generations About Work
The host lays out the shift as he sees it — people used to work a job, not care what the company did, and retire; now they leave companies whose values do not match theirs, or start businesses around the values instead of the profits
Mackin sees generational differences but also people who cannot make the shift at all, stuck in their ways, unable to handle not having a thing to do
He names a specific inherited nervousness: people afraid to spend money they worked hard to create in case it runs out, and describes today's workers as the third generation removed from Great Depression parents
The change he reports is that the trade is becoming visible: "there's more and more people that are starting to recognize that and realize that the money doesn't buy the happiness" — Mackin
The Wealth Transfer and What Inheritors Might Do With It
The show's own framing for the closing question came from the host, with the numbers attached: "There's about $80 trillion of wealth that is about to be transferred from basically our parents. It was like $38 trillion in real estate and then like another $40 trillion in IRA 401(k)s, saving stocks, etc." — the host
The host wonders aloud whether the recipients will work at all — "Maybe they just retire at 30 and they just travel around the world" — and what that does to the number of people in jobs
Mackin answers from the advising years, and his first point is about conversation, not allocation: "When there's no conversation and the children inherit this money and there's a trustee that is kind of dictating things and doing all that, it can create confusion" — Mackin
His cautionary examples are celebrity estates: Tom Petty, who he says "passed away and didn't even have a will", leaving confusion and fighting, and Michael Jackson, in a group he describes with "They just did a lack of planning or maybe no planning at all"
He contrasts estates where a plan exists and assets are distributed in a structured way with estates where nothing at all was done, which he calls a complete disaster for the generation inheriting
What he expects the money to do is move out of default exposure: rather than "instead of just like allocating money into the S&P 500 and putting money into companies that they don't really have any affiliation or interest in", he thinks inheritors "maybe they carve out a portion of that money that they have invested in the public markets and put it into companies that really they support" — Mackin
The reason he gives is tax friction, and it is the most concrete claim in the episode: current holders "have low cost bases, so they're like hesitant to like make a move because then they got to pay taxes", while "when the money transfers from one generation to another, the inheritors can do really whatever they want with much less tax implications" — Mackin
He expects the destination to be private rather than public: "access to those types of investments are getting greater and greater with all the technology that we have and is developing" — Mackin
The host closes by telling Mackin he has made him optimistic about life in general and that "You have a very soothing voice. You could do a meditation app, and I would listen to it, by the way"
Mackin's bottom line is that money is an expanding resource rather than a scarce one, that the fear people attach to it is really a fear of something else entirely, and that the generation about to inherit will be freer than its parents to put capital into things it actually believes in.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Tom Petty and Michael Jackson (Mackin's two examples of estates handled badly — Petty died without a will, which he says produced confusion and fighting; Jackson is in the group he describes as doing little or no planning at all)
S&P 500 (The default destination he expects inheritors to move away from, on the grounds that it puts money into companies they have no affiliation with)
IRAs and 401(k)s (Named by the host as where roughly half the wealth about to be transferred sits, alongside real estate)
Books & Resources Mentioned
True Wellth – Christopher Mackin (The book he says the silent retreat instructed him to write; published a few weeks before this conversation)
Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell (Named, with hesitation, as the book on why some people reach far higher levels of success than others)
Vipassana (The 10-day silent meditation retreat, which he has now done in India and again in Thailand; he describes it as the hardest thing he has ever done)
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