Katie Krispin is an estate planning attorney and a member at Adventure Unknown, and this is her second time in the chair — the first one, roughly two years ago, caught her right as she was standing up her own practice. She notes early that this podcast is how she found the place at all: she couldn’t figure out what Adventure Unknown was, kept showing up anyway, and eventually Scott laid down the law — shit or get off the pot. What has changed in two years is mostly internal, and she says so plainly. She knows the craft; the business building is “a whole another animal.” She names herself a perfectionist and a people pleaser by nature and by nurture, describes the setbacks that come from both, and calls the work of unravelling that conditioning something she expects to be doing for the rest of her life. The payoff she names is ego: “I’ve shed my ego a lot in the last two years,” and with it the pressure, because the point of the work turned out to be service — something she says she used to believe and now actually feels. That opens into the most practical stretch of the episode, which is really about boundaries. Zach confesses he called a client back at 8:30 the night before despite having set a hard cutoff, and caught himself doing it mid-dial. Pat lays out the counter-system in detail: auto-text replies instead of live answers, treating the office line as a lead filter because everyone who actually knows him calls his cell, one non-negotiable business task per day knocked out before noon, no more than two consultations stacked in a day, and Do Not Disturb from 4:00 until the kids are in bed. Underneath it is the line that reframes the whole thing — there are very few actual emergencies in either of their industries, and both of them have been treating everything like one. The cost of not doing that is the emotional center. Pat wanted to be the top producer, got there, and it f*****g sucked — it cost him time with his kids he cannot get back, and he now only has them half the time. Zach, separately, admits he was gone far more than he realized during his oldest son’s first year, told himself the baby wouldn’t remember it, and looks back knowing he missed things. Katie, 32 and thinking hard about kids, asks how you prepare for it; both of them tell her you don’t. The last third is the reason she’s a guest. The biggest misconception she fights is that estate planning is for rich people — if you have any asset, it needs protection, and there is no one-size-fits-all. She talks about the negative stigma around selling and how she gets around it by educating instead of closing, illustrated by a woman who called her that same morning about a probate matter and said Katie was the fourth person she’d talked to and the first to explain anything. Then the material that nobody else could have given you: digital assets and what happens to your social media when you die, the review cadence most estate planners skip, the craziest plan she’s seen (a man whose ashes were to be tattooed into his daughters), Gunther the dog and five generations of an inherited fortune, and the apocalypse clause — the part of the process where she has to look a client in the eye and ask who they don’t like, and who they want to get nothing. She closes on the Tombstone game with the line the whole episode has been circling: “Got out of my own way.” Personal growth has to precede professional growth, or you go to the next level kicking and screaming.
