Building Connection Capital: How Jeffersonian Dinners Help Families Go Beyond Financial Wealth with Tim Brown

Most advisors gather clients for dinners and updates. But when it comes to building genuine connection – and trust that endures beyond markets or products – most conversations play it too safe.

On this episode of Visionary Advisor, Alex Kirby (founder of Total Family) sits down with Tim Brown, co-founder of Somos22, to unpack the 225-year-old Jeffersonian dinner format and why its architecture for trust-building is more relevant than ever for advisors hoping to matter across generations. Tim shares lessons from hosting over a hundred such gatherings for family offices, revealing how thoughtful curation, powerful questions, and a commitment to true connection can quietly determine financial and relational outcomes among wealthy families.

The conversation invites wealth advisors to reimagine the purpose of client gatherings, moving beyond transactional events to experiences where trust can compound. They explore the mechanics of running an unforgettable dinner: how to structure conversation, manage vulnerability, handle silence, and frame questions that move people past pleasantries and into meaning. Tim and Alex also discuss tension points — including what happens when conversations get “too real", why family dynamics require careful navigation, and how the right question can spark reflection that lasts long after dessert.

Expect practical insights for creating spaces where families (and their advisors) show up as people first — and where “connection capital" is measured by who returns your call when it matters.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• 04:27 The concept of “connection capital” and why high-trust relationships drive family outcomes
• 08:33 Essential elements and rules of a Jeffersonian dinner for advisors — from structure to group norms
• 11:01 Icebreaker questions that foster vulnerability and depth
• 14:26 How to match questions and topics to the makeup of your room (professionals vs. principals, spouses, multi-gen)
• 17:00 Practical logistics: food, venue, timing, seating, and creating the right ambiance
• 19:23 Navigating moments of silence or vulnerability as a moderator
• 23:29 Ideal group sizes — and why too few or too many can backfire
• 32:03 The topics that matter most to ultra-wealthy families (hint: it’s not portfolios or investments)
• 33:09 Special considerations for dinners involving spouses or multiple generations

Notable Quotes from Tim Brown

“The way we define connection capital is the measurable value of high trust relationships. Who trusts your judgment, who will return your call, who shows up when something actually matters.”

“Silence is welcome. There’s no pressure to perform here... We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

“You can overwhelm people with too many questions and not give them enough time to kind of catch their breath.”

“If you’re not getting nervous, then you’re not doing it right, I guess. These dinners matter so much to me — you matter so much to me.”

“The output of a Jeffersonian dinner is that people leave trusting each other a lot more, because you’re able to bring in the human element of their lives.”

Resources

• Somos 22 (https://somos22network.com/)
• Total Family (https://totalfamily.io/) 
• YPO Investing Network (https://www.ypo.org)
• Tiger 21 (https://tiger21.com)
• Swexan Hotel, Dallas (https://hotelswexan.com)

Stay Connected with Visionary Advisor
We believe wealth is well-being. Subscribe to the Visionary Advisor Newsletter for practical tools and ideas to serve families across generations.
Explore more at totalfamily.io | Follow us on LinkedIn | Watch episode clips on YouTube

Stay Connected with Visionary Advisor
We believe wealth is well-being. Subscribe to the Visionary Advisor Newsletter for practical tools and ideas to serve families across generations.
Explore more at totalfamily.io | Follow us on LinkedIn |  Watch episode clips on YouTube

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Is really not about right or wrong. It's really about noticing your own evolution in your life. And what belief about trust did you inherit rather than choose? What's coming up for you when I asked that question? But if I had just come out of the shoot and said, hey, what belief about trust did you inherit rather than choose? People would be looking at you like a little confused. Like I know I would.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Most advisors are good at bringing clients together. Dinner, drinks, a speaker, maybe a market update. People enjoy it. They say thank you and they go home. But most of those nights never touch on the questions that families are actually carrying, the experiences that people are looking for. People are looking for connection. The rooms are full, but the conversation stayed too safe. Tim Brown and his partner Brian Adams saw this pattern at family office events. Full rooms, good content, but the relationships never quite compounded. So they built something different. Somos22 has run 54 events across 18 cities, over a thousand family office attendees, and at the center of what they do is a dinner format that's about 225 years old. Welcome to Visionary Advisor. I'm your host, Alex Kirby, founder of Total Family. Today's guest is Tim Brown, co-founder of Somos 22. We're talking about Jeffersonian dinners, what the format is, why it works, and how advisors can use a simple dinner to build real connection. Let's get into it. Tim Brown, founder of Somos 22, a prestigious family office group. Thank you for coming on Visionary Advisor.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Alex, thanks for having me. This is great. Uh, been really looking forward to our time together.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Me too. We got connected through uh mutual friend Brian Adams. I've gone on Brian's podcast and he reached out and said, you need to talk to Tim. And I was skeptical. But then after we talked, you you sent me a couple of things around Jeffersonian dinners. And that's what I really want to dive into today because I love Jeffersonian dinners. We can talk about them. I think most of my friends and the people in my life are sick of me attempting to make dinners Jeffersonian. But as I understand it, when President Jefferson in the early 1800s, he was famous for these dinners where he was he was doing it before he was president, and then he did it in the White House, but he would bring groups of people together to sort of have discourse around politics. And can you give it like, do you have more history than that on these on these dinners?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Yeah, he hosted them weekly. He would use a dumb waiter because he didn't want to have the room interrupted once dinner started. So the doors would be shut, dinner would be served at the center of the table. In that era, when you think about the United States was this brand new nation, and you had all of these thought leaders who would cycle in and be at this dinner. At the time, I mean, just in in President Jefferson's remarkable history, he had read every book in the Western hemisphere in his lifetime. Wow. And just a incredible statesman. He was just always uh on this thirst for knowledge. And I think that, you know, when you're in a moderated dinner where you have a topic or several topics, but you get the collective wisdom of everyone at the table, it's pretty special.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

We're gonna dive into Jeffersonian dinners. I think these are a secret weapon for wealth advisors. We're seeing lots of them use, you know, variations of this. Who am I to say what dinner is Jeffersonian? What dinner just is a great conversation kind of thing? But I want to go into that. But first, I feel like when I look at your background and when I look at what you're trying to build with SOMO's 22, you feel like there is a a lack of connection or a lack of really healthy discussion, or it seems like there's and I think you use the term connection capital, but I just want to maybe start with this broader thing that you're you're tackling here. Is connection the word that bring that ties all your stuff together?

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, uh, thank you for asking that. It's something that Brian and I really focused a lot on in the early days of what were we going to do with the architecture of Somos 22 that was different. And the way we define connection capital is the measurable value of high trust relationships. Who trusts your judgment, who will return your call, who shows up when something actually matters. So in family offices and multi-generational families, my belief is that connection capital quietly determines outcomes. And that could be financial, intellectual, human capital matters, but it's really the connection capital that reduces friction across all of them. And for years, a lot of the family office world has been organized more around conferences and speakers and the exchange of information. And certainly there's nothing wrong with that. Sure. What we were trying to do is come at it from the other direction, which was how do we create connection within a community? One of the things that we identified that was missing were deeper connections because there's so much responsibility-driven isolation that occurs within the family office world by just nature of it being so siloed and opaque and private for all the reasons that we understand why it's that way.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Yeah, that's interesting. So I feel like sometimes when I go to one of those conferences, it's just one-way information coming at you. In my mind, sometimes I'm like, I could have just listened to a podcast about this, or I could have watched a video on it, or I could have read about it. And so to me, that connection is getting rarer and rarer. And the groups that are doing it well, I think there's a premium that people are willing to pay to be part of those actual, authentic, real connection groups, with the caveat being I don't know if you've ever heard the CEO of Shopify Talk me talks about the trust battery. It's basically like everyone comes into your company in a 50% trust battery. And when you do things that deteriorate trust, it decreases the battery. And when you do things that build trust, it increases the battery. And I feel like this could also be true in these networking groups where everyone sort of comes in at that 50% battery, and then you see someone kind of pushing a product or trying to take a shortcut or trying to take take from the group. And that just very quickly is gonna deteriorate that battery for the group. And then you see people who are giving to the group, sharing ideas, they have an abundance mindset kind of thing, and that elevates the trust. So I like that you threw trust in there along with connection.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Thank you. I appreciate that. And like I said, I'm very, very passionate about it.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's go to Jeffersonian dinners. Okay. To me, one of the best business development strategies that we've seen for advisors are to have a nice dinner. With the caveat though, for me, if you're trying to close some business, having a nice dinner with some clients and their spouse and having them bring some friends is a really good idea. We actually help a lot of advisors. We have like templates and exercises and kind of along the similar lines of what you're doing, not as in-depth, but we know this strategy works. The hard part, I think, is that moment where you have to stand up and create an experience for the people at the dinner. Because if you just go to dinner and you order food and it breaks off into separate conversations and people leave, I don't know if that's going to do the trick. So use that maybe lens as we're talking about Jeffersonian dinners, like thinking about an advisor, maybe doing something like this with their clients or or with prospects. What does a Jeffersonian dinner look like? Do you have to have a dumb waiter? No, that's a great question. Okay, good.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

No. What I think you do need to have, though, are a very clear set of rules about why you're you're doing this. The phones away, no note-taking, Chatham House rules. I think three hours is the right amount of time, not more than three. I like to have a balance between long form questions, short form questions. I like to use quotes. I usually have four to five themes uh of a broader theme, but sections within that theme throughout the night to the kind of change it up. I like using a tip jar at the end so we can all lean in and kind of help. The evening is really designed as a long form, high trust conversation. What I think Jefferson was so eloquent about, and I think this makes a great advisor to families, is the goal is never about consensus or performance or problem solving in the context of telling other people what to do. It was asking thoughtful questions and prompts and having it be a dialogue.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

And I think good advisors know how to ask very powerful questions that help unlock things versus just giving an opinion.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Yeah, totally. So, like, you know, even in my setup, the goal can't really be to just get your friends to introduce their friends, right? That's kind of a self-serving goal of the advisor. So you have to be okay with the outcome being you're not going to get any business from it. You're just trying to add value to the collective group. So it sounds like you, in this case, might be the advisor. You're bringing some questions, like you're doing your homework in advance. What does that look like? And then, you know, are you just throwing out the question? Everyone's talking over each other, you're like moderating. Like, how does give us the prep work and like kind of the mechanics of it all?

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah. So I think that you always want to get a sense who here has participated before in a Jeffersonian dinner, right? Because if you haven't been to a moderated dinner before, it's a complete change of format. One of the icebreaker questions that I really like to ask Alex is when you have somebody introduce themselves, you know, name, where do you live, where are you from, you know, uh meaning the family office. But the question is, what almost kept you from being here tonight? You get some really interesting answers that come out of that question. But what that question is really giving people is a permission to open up, the permission for depth. It's not a question that most people are used to getting in a dinner context.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

So right out of the chute, you see people lean in with just the right amount of vulnerability, yeah, right, with that question. I love that. And then it starts to open up from there.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

I think we see this with with legacy letters. We feel this, but it's like when you say icebreaker, we're trying to warm people up. Right. Right. It's not, it's not gonna be the first question, it shouldn't be about who's the most important person in your life that's no longer with us. It shouldn't be about your biggest fear. You know, you're trying to get people who maybe don't know everyone in the room that they could be a little apprehensive. You're trying to start with safer questions that allow people maybe to laugh, to have fun, to be creative with some of these questions. And the cool thing I think about AI in general is like AI can help you think of 4,000 million infinity icebreaker questions until you find one that you like. I really like the what kept you from being here tonight.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Yeah, you know, thank you. And I write a new run of show for every single Jeffersonian dinner that we do. And but it but the one thing that I I always try to do in terms of framing is speak from your own experience. You don't need to answer questions that you don't feel you want to, you can pass, that's fine. No advice giving. This is not a problem-solving room. Silence is welcome. There's no pressure to perform here. There's a great quote from John Dewey that we do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. And so that's really what you're trying to do is to get everybody to lean in. It's kind of like that Jim Rohn quote that we are the average of our five closest friends. And I kind of think that's the same sort of thing as if you can get everybody to lean in and trust each other, you're gonna get this really powerful effect from that as people reflect on their own experience.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Do you do a rules at the beginning? Hey, I'm gonna ask a bunch of questions, we're gonna go in counterclockwise order, you know, you can pass, you can do it. Like, do you have sort of uh rules that you do at the beginning? Do you send anything out to people in advance so they know what's what's coming, or does that like would that scare people off?

SPEAKER_00 13:32

I think it would scare people off.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

And I think that's one of those things in terms of a of where EQ is so important as a moderator, because you never want people to feel they're uncomfortable. You know, what I try to do is in the family office world, if I have an audience that's predominantly professional managers, I may have a different set of questions versus if I have an audience that is uh predominantly principals. Because if I'm getting into questions around, hey, if you could fast forward a hundred years from now and have a conversation with your descendants related to wealth and the values that created your wealth, what questions would you want to ask your descendants? Well, you know, that's a different question, depending on who you're talking to within the audience. So I think it's important to understand what the composition of the table is. And so I use different levels of questions as well. I have level one, level two, level three within each of the themes that allows me to kind of mix and match if I need to on how I feel like things are going, how things are pacing. So if you had a three-hour amount of time, let's say the first half an hour was you giving the rules and then everybody introducing themselves and answering your icebreaker question. Okay. The next hour and 15 minutes, I'll use what I call long form questions. And you know, these I think are really important just in terms of if people really leaning in. I'll give you an example. Let's pretend that we were talking about legacy, okay? Okay. If an example of a long form question would be, Alex, if your life into tomorrow, what story would those who know you today tell about you? Okay. That's a powerful question, and and it's and it's attached to a lot of things. But that's not something that is a fast question to answer.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Okay. I think it's important that you're able to have long form questions be the first half or or 60% of the time that you're spending, have 30% of it be what I call short form questions. What are a few patterns or routines that currently define your days? That's an easier question to ask. I'm I'm using that simply to contrast the last question that I asked to you. Sure, yeah, yeah, right. You know, and then you can get into what I I like doing what are called tip jar questions towards the end. That's like the last 15 to 25 minutes before you do your checkout of just, you know, hey, love to hear what's a small habit that made a big difference in your life? What's a moment that really changed the direction in your life to where you are now? What's some advice that stayed with you from when you were a kid? That's really fun for people to lean in to talk about those kinds of things. And again, it's not so heavy that people can't relate.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

In terms of the some of the logistics of this, you're probably getting a private room. Are you talking to the staff in advance to say, like, hey, there's some flow here to make them aware of it? And then have you learned anything about like ordering food? I'm I'm thinking about like just Jefferson with the dumbwaiter thing, where it's like someone is talking about their legacy and how they would remember, and then you know, someone's walking in.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

So you always pick the wines, you always have a pre-selected menu.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

You have everybody order before the icebreakers. The meals are served promptly at seven, desserts are served promptly at eight, and coffee so that there doesn't have to be any interruption regarding that. It's important for you to understand what the lighting of the room is going to be. It's important for you to understand what the ambient noise within the restaurant is going to be, and whether there's going to be music in that room, because those will all change. You also, when you think of good, better, best on configuration. The best configuration is hard to find in the world. And there's very, very few venues with a round table. If I were able to create the most ideal outcome on the planet, you would be in a perfectly square room with a round table in it. And you would also have curtains that would be like felt that would be hanging in that room, like old school kind of Europe. The way the Swexon hotel is set up in Dallas is a great example of that with one of the rooms that they have that really dead and sound and it just feels incredibly intimate in that regard. You know, and it's the same thing. Like I do connection luncheons, which are basically two-hour versions of Jeffersonian dinner, but where you get to meet every single person in the room. Like you physically move twice during the course of the luncheon. But back to Jeffersonian dinner, good, better, best. Good is you're at a rectangle, better is you're at a square table, perfectly square, by the way. And best, which is incredibly, like, as I mentioned, rare is that you're a circular table.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Okay. Let me take sort of two pieces here. One would be maybe an advisor who's worried about asking the wrong questions. I want to go to topics after this, like general topics, but they ask a question, it gets weird. It gets quiet. Someone brings up something that is kind of like stuns people. Right. How do you handle that as a moderator? How do you think about silence? How do you think about when, you know, maybe someone takes a topic that is like like a six or a seven, and then they are talking about something very traumatic or something very serious, or how have you learned to sort of navigate those waters?

SPEAKER_00 19:23

Yeah, I, you know, that's a delicate issue. I think silence is your friend. And I also think you don't want to make it a bigger deal than it is. Like you can just simply shift gears to a different question, or you can just thank them and move on. But you you always want to do that in the highest respectful way. Yep. Because people will get vulnerable and sometimes they may feel, oh, I overshared, and you don't ever want someone to feel like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

And I think that's also there's a lot of trust that's placed in your hands as the moderator, especially between the end of our one and hour one and a half. That's really where dinners get made or lost, is in that period of time.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

For an advisor that's hasn't done this before, they might be thinking, like, Tim, I can't do a three-hour dinner. This is that that seems so long. Would you tell them, yes, you can? Or would you say start with, you know, maybe something shorter?

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Yeah, because from six to six twenty is going to be cocktail reception and people just kind of visiting and getting to know each other. And by the time you get settled in, it'll be 6:30. Yep. And I always say, you know, look on the stickler of starting on time and ending on time will end right at nine o'clock. And now you're two and a half hours in. You have a minimum of a 30-minute, please introduce yourself with the icebreaker. Now you're into the last two hours of programming. And then, you know, you figure you've got three long form questions and then four short form and a checkout. I always like to ask permission from the group. Would everybody like to be connected? And I will attach my run of show notes so they can see everything that I didn't ask them through the course of the night, plus everything I did and then all the framing that I like to do. I'm a big believer that I think there's a narrative that really helps and it goes a long way in kind of setting up, I call it a frame. If we're talking about inherited definitions, you know, what we learned before what we chose. You know, a lot of times there are things that we learned before we knew, right? I mean, that's a part of growing up. I think it's important to tee that up by saying most of us inherit early definitions of trust with family, work, or formative relationships. You know, experience tends to refine them. This next theme that we're in is really not about right or wrong. It's really about noticing your own evolution and your life and what belief about trust. Trust did you inherit rather than choose? What's coming up for you when I asked that question? But if I had just come out of the shoot and said, hey, what belief about trust did you inherit rather than choose? People would be looking at you like a little confused. Like I know I would. By warming up each of the questions by giving background, I think it's always, again, from a best practice, it's really a difference between, you know, a good and great.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

And you like quotes too, as a way to do that, right? Uh I do. I'm a big fan of quotes. So am I. I probably overquote if you ask my team, they'd be like, Alex is constantly overquoting things. So it's good to meet another person who loves quotes. I I don't know if they always land. I feel like sometimes they do, but but be careful not to overquote as well, as my team tells me.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Yeah, well, I I get that. That makes a lot of sense. What about the number of people? I think it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Like, I think there's a critical mass that you need where if you have a room of eight people, that's gonna really be way too taxing on them for like a full on Jeffersonian dinner. It's way too much.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Okay. Wait, it's too little people or too many people?

SPEAKER_00 23:11

That's that's not enough people.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Not enough people. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yeah, especially for someone that hasn't experienced it before. My experience is that you can overwhelm people with too many questions and and not give them enough time to kind of catch their breath.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

And your three-hour dinner, you're thinking that's more of 12?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Now, most of my dinners, believe it or not, I I probably 16 to 20. Oh, okay. But it's just because you end up when we're in cities, they're they're just in in high demand. You know, so I will also ask short form, what are called binary questions. You know, here's an example of one I did about relationships can tend to be barbelled. We have the relationships that we make when we're kids of family, of friends, people who will be here for life, you know, who we've known our whole lifetime. And then on the other side of the barbell, you have people who really stretch you, people who you've known who you may not pick your, you know, choose your family, but you pick them on that other side. But a lot of people spend time in the middle. And the middle is because in business, that's where you spend a lot of your time. But those aren't necessarily the people that you're going to carry forward with you if times get very difficult, right? Yep. And so, and it can be easy to not see that that first barbell, you know, side of the barbell of family, you know, over time they get older and they die. And when you're in your 50s or 60s, you can all of a sudden find yourself very lonely. And so we had a Jeffersonian dinner where we talked about that. And one of the sections was called the fragile middle, what I was just explaining to you. And I'll give you the nuance here is that I started off with the framing of the middle often feels full, but not always meaningful. This is where relationships exist, but do not necessarily contribute to clarity, trust, or growth. And the first round you answered quickly. This round is a little different. The answers may still come quickly, but they may feel different. And this is where the middle starts to show up. And so the layer one question was busy or intentional, which one? And it where it becomes more instinctual, and each person answers one of the two, busy or intentional. Next one, active or meaningful, known or understood. And it becomes as fast as you can answer that, where you don't have time to think about it. And so when you're in a bigger audience, the ability to go between long form, short form, and binary questions and how you do the framing, how you use quotes, and how you do your exit framing are all really important of how you tie everything together because what you find is that it actually starts to create the story that everybody's in. And it's very powerful if you do it that way. That's why I always like to have, you know, call it the denouement at the end of it, where you you finally pull it all back together at the the very end, what which I call the closing. Yep. And I always like to ask, you know, hey, what stayed with you tonight? Or what felt most true to you tonight, or what are you thinking about that's different than when you came in here? Would everybody like to be connected? Would you like my run of show notes from tonight? The thesis of get back to when Brian Adams and I founded SoMus 22 is we're trying to create more connection capital between families. And so if we can have this bonding event occur at the dinner table that night, we want to bring everybody together. We want them to see everything that we were brought together using as a as a group. And then if they decide that they want to keep in touch with each other or one-on-one, it's up to them to do that.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Yeah. At that point, right, right, right. I love the closing, just kind of tying it up a little bit. To me, that would be really important. And as you as you mentioned, ending on time. Yeah, absolutely. Like, how many of these do you think you've done? I'm not gonna, you know, fact check this, but just like hearing you talk, it just seems like I'm talking to someone who really has been around a lot of Jeffersonian dinner tables.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yeah. So when I was chairman of the YPO investing network, which was our equivalent of Tiger 21 inside of YPO, not as fine-tuned as Tiger 21. We were looking for a way as a network that was global instead of YPOs that have been organized as chapters. We were looking for a way to bring a global community together of 6,000 members. And we said, let's do Jeffersonian dinners in gateway markets, and we'll use a format, you know, people like to eat, people like to talk about investing, people like to talk about their family, and it'll be a great way for us to bring together members of the network was a huge success. You know, we did London and Dubai and Tokyo and Hong Kong and Mexico City and different places as part of it in New York. So, in a long-winded way of answering your question that I guess I could have answered quickly, I think it's way over a hundred, I can tell you that. Yeah, way, way over a hundred.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

That's really cool. But you know, at the end, you know, for any advisor who's like, I couldn't really do that, you had to do your first one at some point, right? And you're probably nervous and you probably it probably wasn't as good as it is today. But if you never take the leap, if you never try it, you're not gonna get better, you're not gonna grow. So I think that's that's cool. It's it's it's easy for us to sit here and be like, oh, I could never do it as well as Tim is. And and and maybe to a certain extent that's true. Do you remember like being nervous before your first one? Or do you remember the first one that you did?

SPEAKER_00 28:58

I don't know if I remember the first one. The the I've I get nervous before every single one of them still.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Yeah. Wait, I want to talk about this for a second. Okay, so I just speak in San Diego like 10 years ago, and I wasn't ready. And I remember like I couldn't go to sleep, and so then I stayed up most of the night because I didn't feel like I was prepared. And I remember just being like, that this is never gonna happen to me, I forgot. And so the next time I spoke, I was extremely prepared, but still had the nerves. I found a couple like breathing exercises that helped me just sort of tame the butterflies. But even if I'm extremely prepared, I will still have some butterflies. Does that track with how you you feel in these situations? And just like any any tips for for me or the advisors out there?

SPEAKER_00 29:50

I think if you're not getting nervous, then like you're not doing it right.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

I guess great. I feel great now.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

You know, and and by the way, I learned this from public speaking when I was doing some keynotes. When you get off stage before you do your keynote and you meet the first row and you shake hands with everybody and you introduce yourself and you learn about them, when you're giving your keynote, you all of a sudden have this front row of friends who are all there supporting you. And it feels incredible because there's this human element, right, of uh of us being connected, right? As people.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

You're saying, like, before you go on, you're saying hello to simple.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Before a keynote, yeah, you always go down and meet the front row. I like always meet the front row. And so it's kind of the same thing in a Jeffersonian dinner is like I'm so nervous that I'll say, hey, you know, I've given so many of these, like you wouldn't believe me. You probably need an abacus to count them all. But I still get nervous when I do this because they matter so much to me. You matter so much to me.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

And uh, so you know, kind of bear with me. I think everybody appreciates that. It's hard. Like, but I I also think if you go in and you're prepared and you know what you want to talk about, I would also say at a Jeffersonian dinner, I one thing I learned as the chairman of the investing network for YPO is I thought everybody wanted to talk about investing, but they don't. They didn't talk about their kids and the complexities of wealth and governance and uh you know, healthy marriages, and how do I treat future son-in-laws and daughter-in-laws like in-laws, not outlaws?

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

And, you know, how do I impart the values that created the wealth down to the next generation? And how do I, my grandchildren, you know, what's a family bank? And how do I use a family bank to empower, you know, them to believe that they're gen one and to self-actualize? I mean, those are the questions that everybody wanted to talk about at our dinners. And it was uh, it was interesting. And I've evolved that now to where we talk about a lot of things. But uh, I love your questions, they're all very thorough.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Well, you can tell, I mean, like when we talked about this, you could tell that I have just a genuine interest. I I have a disdain for small talk. You either probably love that about me or or you don't like that about me, but it tracks with the work that we're doing at Total Family. And I guess, like related to that, have you done any of these with spouses? And do the rules change with spouses? And have you done any multi-gen? We have a couple partner firms who have done both spouses with friends, got kind of a couple's dinner. We've also seen firms do multi-gen dinner, like grandparents, parents, older grandchildren. Obviously, the topics, you know, knowing your audience and all that stuff is is relevant. But um, do the rules change at all when when you're going like intra-family or you're or you're involving the couples?

SPEAKER_00 32:59

It does. And I think if you're gonna do next gen or multi-gen, if you want to have the most optimal output, you want to have two families at the table, not one. And you also want to create a rule where the matriarch and the patriarch have their sets of questions and then they have to be quiet, and then the children have their sets of questions, and they had to be quiet during the matriarch and patriarch speaking. The same thing holds true when the children, the adult children are speaking. But if you add one extra family to the mix, you'll get a lot more out of the children sitting at the table than you will if it's just them with their parents. I love that. I love that. And a question that I think is important to ask in that construct is what's the greatest potential that you see in the next generation with them sitting at the table? So cool. Yeah, that's a powerful question to ask.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Yeah, thank you so much. I I really appreciate you coming on. And you know, legacy for us is like a great topic for these dinners very, very broadly. I love it that you talked about the investing piece, because we see a lot of market update dinners. And to me, they're great, but if you're an advisor who's like, I don't know about this, it's like if you're doing a handful of market update dinners a year, you can replace one with a Jeffersonian dinner like this and just see how it goes. I would be very surprised if your clients don't like it, if it doesn't sort of extract a little bit deeper things from them. And there's just less competition when I see like our advisory firms write market updates. You know, there's thousands of market updates coming out.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Yeah, you nailed it. What people are are looking for is the ability to compare notes at the human level. Yeah, you know, that gets back to the core function of what Somos 22 represents. We curate private trust networks.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

Within that private trust network, we create a set of rules that we interface with. We use an experiential architecture to create connection capital. And the output of that is that we compound trust at a faster rate than it would on its own between families. And that and you know, so everything that we do has that intentionality baked into it. And that's the great thing about a Jeffersonian dinner construct, is that it does just that. It is a private trust network at the table. There is a defined set of rules that you engage with. It is an experiential architecture because it you're relying on everybody's experience, not just in the past, but in the future as you grow together. And the output of that is people leave that dinner trusting each other a lot more because you were able to bring in the human element of their lives into it. That's why it's so special.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Tim, thank you so much for for coming on. I look forward to one day having the honor of seeing you in action.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Thank you. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

And give my best to uh to Brian. Thanks for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

I'll do it. All right, Alex. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

That's it for Visionary Advisor. Thank you to our guest and to Total Family, whose software is helping advisors do legacy better. If you're a fan of Visionary Advisor, please subscribe and share it with another top notch wealth advisor like yourself. And we'll see you next time.