Adventurer Garrett Gee turned a four month family trip in 2015 into The Bucket List Family, documenting world travel with his wife, Jessica, and their kids. What began as videos shared on YouTube and Instagram became a global family travel brand with millions of followers, built on experiences from shark diving in South Africa to hot air balloons in Turkey and biking through shrines and gardens in Japan.
Adventurer Garrett Gee turned a four month family trip in 2015 into The Bucket List Family, documenting world travel with his wife, Jessica, and their kids. What began as videos shared on YouTube and Instagram became a global family travel brand with millions of followers, built on experiences from shark diving in South Africa to hot air balloons in Turkey and biking through shrines and gardens in Japan.
Connect with Garrett & The Bucket List Family:
Explore the REI and Intrepid Travel collections
Thank you to our sponsors:
Garrett Gee:
I had applied for a job in Portland, but the man who was interviewing me at the very end, he's like, "I think the last question that we need to discuss is how much money is it going to take to secure this for you?" And as a joke, I answered to that saying, "You just need to pay me more that is better than traveling the world with my family for free." And as those words left my mouth, I just came to this realization like, oh shoot, no amount of money is better than traveling the world with my family for free, let alone getting paid for it.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2015, Garrett Gee started documenting an international family vacation that was only supposed to last four months. He posted videos of himself, his wife, Jessica, and their kids on YouTube and Instagram under the name The Bucket List Family. Fast-forward 10 years and that short trip has turned into a business and an inspiration to countless others.
The Bucket List Family has acquired millions of followers online as they bring their audience along on their world travels. They've gone shark diving in South Africa, watched hot air balloons in Turkey, biked through shrines and gardens in Japan, and learned about ancient mythology in the heart of Greece. Garrett and his family chose a life that pushes them beyond their comfort zone, into new places, real challenges, and experiences that change how they see the world. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
Garrett Gee, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Garrett Gee:
Thank you for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
Where do we even start? Were you always like this? Tell me a little bit about your childhood and your love of adventure and nature.
Garrett Gee:
I mean, if the question is, have I always been into going against the grain? Yeah, for sure. That's just an innate part of who I am. Same with the entrepreneurial side. I was that kid that was collecting rocks in my backyard because I just loved being outside in nature and all of that. But then the entrepreneur and me would kick in and I'd put them on a table, put them in my front yard and sell them back to the other neighbor kids. And I grew up in quite the wealthy neighborhood, so it wasn't uncommon for me to be able to put a price tag on a $20 rock or a $50 crystal and kids would buy them.
Shelby Stanger:
Where did you grow up?
Garrett Gee:
In Utah, a place called Alpine, Utah.
Shelby Stanger:
And so there was a lot of nature there too. That's awesome.
Garrett Gee:
Yeah. A lot of nature, a lot of outdoors, a lot of skiing. It was a cool place where I grew up. They had what was called ski bus and a bus would come from our school straight to the ski resort. And so we lived on the mountain.
Shelby Stanger:
So after school, you would ski almost every day?
Garrett Gee:
The ski bus was once a week.
Shelby Stanger:
That's pretty great though for a kid.
Garrett Gee:
We loved it. And also the amount of just epic lifelong stories that happened, I'm pretty sure half of our grade had their first kiss on ski bus. It was just where life happened.
Shelby Stanger:
What about the travel though? Where did that come from?
Garrett Gee:
My personal love for traveling can be thanks mostly to my mom because my mom is just, as much as I love travel, she loves travel a hundred times more than me. And we had our highs and lows as a family financially. And for God and for bad, it didn't matter if we were on a high or a low. My mom was traveling. So I had the fortune opportunity. By the time I was in high school, I had seen most of Europe and been to maybe 40 countries.
Shelby Stanger:
Love that. How did you meet your wife?
Garrett Gee:
We were both on Mormon church missions. And if you don't know too much about that, it's like when a young man turns 19 and a young woman turns, I think the age of 20, they might have changed it since. But you choose if you want to go on a mission for two years, but you don't choose where you go. And so I grew up in Utah, my wife grew up in Colorado and I had friends that got sent to Atlanta, Georgia and to South Korea and Ghana. And my wife and I got sent to Russia. So we met in Vladivostok, Russia in 2008.
Shelby Stanger:
What was that like for being a 19-year-old, 20-year-old in Russia?
Garrett Gee:
It was the most difficult, most depressing, scariest thing I've ever done in my entire life. And I've done quite a bit of experiences and nothing even comes close to how difficult that was. As a 19-year-old, to be plucked away from your friends, your sports and hobbies and your family, and just be put into this very foreign land where you don't know the culture, you don't speak the language or understand the language. And then to take something that's near and dear to you as your faith and your religion and to try to share that earnestly with other people and have them often literally persecute or actually try to beat you up is a really intense thing for a 19-year-old to go through.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, I bet. We actually have had a few Mormons on the show who've talked about that and also how they learned to pitch. They learned how to get rejected at a really young age and accept failure and it was horrible, but I don't know.
Garrett Gee:
It's funny you say that. Not long ago, I was in a pitch meeting with an investor and he straight up was like, "Look, I'm all in on this business mostly because," he's like, "I don't think I've ever seen someone as good a pitch as you." And I was like, "Look," and I explained to him the whole Russia situation and I was like, "If I can for two years sell religion to Russians, I can sell anything."
Shelby Stanger:
In 2008, Garrett came back to the US. He went to college at Brigham Young University, played on the soccer team, and started dating Jessica. The pair got married and moved in together the following year.
Garrett Gee:
That time could be probably best summarized as my wife following me as I followed my dreams. I was playing college soccer in Utah at BYU, and then I was pursuing a startup. I had created an iPhone app called Scan, and then I sold that to Snapchat. And so our life was going all over the place as dictated by my dreams. And I had told my wife, "Let me finish out my full career of college soccer, and then whatever we do next can be your decision." And her idea was, "What if we did a little bit of traveling?"
Shelby Stanger:
Those became famous last words in their family.
What went into the decision? You'd sold this app to Snapchat, which is pretty awesome. I mean, you were pretty young when you did that.
Garrett Gee:
Yeah. It was for a lot of money, life-changing amount of money. And so people just assumed when they saw us take off for this trip around the world that we were spending that money. But we're very proud of the fact that that was not the case. I mentioned my family had been through highs and lows financially. I've seen far more money than we have disappear overnight. Fortunately, me and Jessica were on the same page financially that we felt in our hearts it was not right to spend or splurge this money. And so that's what led to her idea of, should we do a little bit of traveling? Let's go do four to six months of traveling, learn from different cultures, and then maybe we'll have then a better idea of how we want to live life, where we want to live, how we want to spend this money and such.
So we had devised the plan of, let's do a yard sale, sell everything. We had two cars at the time. And from selling all of that, mostly the two cars, it came out to be about $45,000. So that was the plan. Let's travel for four to six months until this $45,000 is gone. And at that point, we'll get back to life. So everything from the acquisition of selling my company had gone into savings and investments. And the entrepreneur and me is very proud of the fact that we were able to take that 45K and start a YouTube channel, start an Instagram and work really hard during our initial travels.
Any place that we would go, we would reach out to hotels, Airbnbs, airlines, any brand that we could hoping they'd either sponsor us or give us a discount. And our promise to them was like, "Hey, we'll show you off on our social media, all 1,000 of our YouTube subscribers and maybe like 10,000 of our Instagram followers." And you can imagine we just got a lot of no, a lot of people who didn't understand what we were even asking because influencer wasn't really a business model yet, but bit by bit, people would understand or take a chance on us.
And at first they were just giving us discounts or stuff for free. And then eventually, eventually they started to pay us when they saw it working. And that $45,000 went from bleeding out really quickly and then it slowed up. And before it hit zero, we started to become profitable, never touching or dipping into that initial acquisition money savings.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, I love that you told me the financial story of this because so many people listen to this podcast and they're like, "Well, I could only do that if I had a trust fund or I sold a company or whatever." I started this podcast with, I think, $3,000 and it was painful.
Garrett Gee:
Sometimes people will ask us, "Do you think you could have or would've done it without that safety net back home of having sold everything?" It's a good question because despite what people usually assume, my wife and I, we're not big risk-takers when it comes to finances. I'll tell you, again, despite what you might see online, because we live this very adventurous lifestyle, but we're extremely frugal. We most of the time don't go on these trips and adventures unless we're able to work together some sort of sponsorship situation.
And so yeah, it's a tough call because on the one hand, I want to be like, "No, we get credit for doing this without that savings because we didn't touch it." But for sure it played a role knowing that that was there to fall back on. So I think if somebody said you would not have taken that risk without it, they might be right. I don't know. It's hard to know.
Shelby Stanger:
I appreciate that honesty. So initially you guys decided to travel for just sounds like four months, right?
Garrett Gee:
Yep. That was the initial plan. It was kind of like budgeted out four to six months. We'll see how long it lasts. And I think it was six countries that we were going to visit.
Shelby Stanger:
So was there an early experience where you were like, hmm, we're going to keep going?
Garrett Gee:
Again, it was mostly my wife, Jessica, who she, to her own surprise, liked the adventures, like being away from home, likes living out of suitcase, liked being more minimal, loved the time together as a family, all of it. And so it wasn't me convincing her, it was more so just a conversation of we want to keep going, how do we make this work financially? And that's when we started to double down and really try to work with brands and such.
Shelby Stanger:
I love it because early on you could kind of customize what you did with brands. There wasn't like, oh, if you have this many followers, we'll do exactly this. There wasn't a formula.
Garrett Gee:
And it was so hit-and-miss because I remember we were working with the Tourism Board of Greece and the lady was like, "So we can't pay you, but we can host you and we will ask you to post this many times on Instagram." And I was like, "Wonderful. How about YouTube?" And she's like, "Well, how does YouTube work?" And I was like, "It's the same but videos." And she's like, "And you just upload them?" I was like, "Yeah." And she's like, "Where do people see them?" I was like, "Oh, you're completely new to this." And then the next month we're working with the Reno Nevada and they have the biggest budget that we've ever worked with. And so it was just the Wild West at the time, so much learning, so much training. We stayed at one hotel where my wife literally set up their Instagram account for them so we could tag them.
Shelby Stanger:
These were the early days of social media when sponsored content and influencing were uncharted territory. After four months of traveling through Australia and Southeast Asia, Garrett and Jessica weren't ready to come home. They had fallen in love with their new lifestyle, even though it wasn't always smooth or easy. So what parts in the beginning felt especially terrifying? Do you have any stories of those early days?
Garrett Gee:
There was definitely like, man, when you're trying to make $45,000 stretch, you're counting every dollar. And I remember being in New Zealand and we got hit so hard with extra checked baggage fees and I was like, "Guys, you're literally stripping away weeks and stops to our adventure." It was so heartbreaking. And I mean, it was a learning lesson that we like, you know what, do we pay this fee or do we just ditch this stuff because we've now been traveling for about a month and we haven't touched the majority of our stuff. It's one of the beauties of travel, you just learn minimalism at its finest. So that was one of the first lessons I remember. And another one was this time we're at the airport in Miami and we had missed our flight and then things weren't lining up and it was just one of those most stressful travel days.
And all of a sudden I hear a blood curdling scream and it turned around and you know that luggage cart that your kids should not sit on? Our child was sitting on it and fell off and just smashed his face and it's just blood everywhere and he needed stitches. And my wife is now crying and Jessica's like, "Should we go home?" And then she starts crying even harder being like, "We don't have a home."
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, no.
Garrett Gee:
But the silver lining there, the beauty in the lesson we learned that day was your family is your home.
Shelby Stanger:
You talk about silver lining so much on your Instagram and your YouTube. And I think that lesson of silver lining is just something that you really learn when you travel and you adventure. I mean, even Yvon Chouinard has that famous quote, "It's not an adventure until something goes wrong."
Garrett Gee:
Yeah, right? Yeah. I mean, it is what it is, right? There's no such thing as there's just the perfect vacation. And if it is, it's kind of boring. The highs and the lows are just all part of the journey.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious, maybe you could talk about some of the things you guys do on your trips, because I'm guessing most people will know you who are listening to this podcast, but there's going to be a few people who don't yet follow the bucket list family.
Garrett Gee:
I'd say this, when we first got started, our last name is Gee. We're the Gee family, but the designer and entrepreneur in me wasn't about to go on a six-month vacation. I wanted to build something and create something. That's my favorite part about entrepreneurship. It truly isn't about the money for me. I just love creating things, designing things. And so then I created a logo, it says The Bucket List Family, but in a lot of colors and it feels like watercolor painting, but to the most vibrant level. And my thought there was life can feel pretty dull and black and white. And that's the beauty of travel because every time you visit a new place or a new culture, it literally infuses vibrancy into your life. And then there's a symbol that is three brush strokes. And why we had come up with that is because Jessica and I had decided we wanted to put more meaning and purpose behind our travels.
So we came up with adventure, culture, and service that represents the three stripes, red, blue, and green. And the thought there was every culture that we visit or every country that we visit, we want to try to do three things. A unique adventure, so let's take example of like New Zealand, bungee jumping was invented in New Zealand, what a cool, unique adventure and to do it in that place where it was originally invented and then a unique culture experience. And so I remember when we were in Bhutan, we were at these monasteries with these monks and they invited us to shave our heads. And as you can see, my hair's quite long. It was very long at the time. And so it was quite the big ask of be like, "Oh my gosh, should we shave our heads?" So me and our middle child, Manila both shaved our heads.
And then the last goal, service, was every place that we go, let's do a service project, big or small. Sometimes they've been big, like we funded and built a school in India. And sometimes it's been small like we hear a heartful story from our taxi driver and give him the tip of his life. And so those three things, adventure, culture, and service have definitely shaped our travels and our mindset, and that's what originated the logo of The Bucket List Family.
Shelby Stanger:
If everybody could travel like you guys, that would be amazing. I mean, everywhere you go, you should do an adventure, experience the culture and give back.
Garrett Gee:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds pretty simplistic, but it adds so much more to each of your travels.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2015, Garrett Gee took his family on a vacation and they never came home. They continued traveling, taking their young family to dream destinations like Chile, Switzerland, Rwanda, Greece, Fiji, Italy. The list goes on and on. But after three years of living a fully nomadic life, the bucket list family decided that they were ready to put down some roads. Eventually, you guys have decided to have a home base. What sparked that decision and how have especially your kids reacted to it?
Garrett Gee:
I don't know. I'll admit we live the best of both lives because we love traveling. And let me just say selfishly, as a dad who so many dads out there don't get to spend a lot of time with their kids because of work. And then especially as kids become older, you're losing time with them to clubs and school and friends and sports and practices, all the sorts. So when we're traveling and I have undivided attention, time, quality time with my family, I just treasure it so much. But it was when my daughter, Dorothy, became kindergarten age and she had seen so much of the world. And if you could ask her, "What do you want most in life?" She would say, "I want to go to school. I want a desk with my name on it. I want a locker and I want a best friend." That's what she wanted.
And so truly as parents, we love the travel adventure, all of it, but at the end of the day, nothing's going to compete with just trying to give our kids what they need and the best life possible. And so that's when we decided to try to settle down and we had looked seriously in New Zealand. We'd even applied for a visa and got accepted, but then my wife got pregnant with our third. And so then we pivoted to look at stuff closer to home and we went and just looked at some properties in Hawaii from Oahu Big Island, Maui. And it was when we were doing that tour that my wife met some incredible families, an amazing community. So for my wife, it was more about the community that she fell in love with. And for me, I was like, oh. And as soon as she says yes to any of these islands, I'm pouncing on it. And so we chose Hawaii as a place to settle down.
Shelby Stanger:
Garrett has loved living in Hawaii. He's able to surf most days, and the family has built a wonderful community there. But having a home base doesn't mean that the bucket list family is ready to stop going after wild ideas. In fact, Garrett recently went after his own wild idea, a childhood dream that most people wouldn't consider a possibility, especially for someone his age. He recently decided to become a professional soccer player. That's so bananas, especially to someone who is now 45 and is like, I played a lot of street soccer even after college, but I feel like I would break my knees if I tried to play soccer today.
Garrett Gee:
Bro, this was the one. It's funny. Some of the hateful comments on this one have me proper shook because I'm like, how do you hate this old dad literally just trying to live up his glory days? I'm like, "Guys, I'm very self-aware. I know that I didn't make it as a young man into the pros. I'm devastated on the daily of that. You don't got to remind me." So what happened is a professional team in Tonga had reached out and said, "We would like to invite you to play, join our team where we qualified for this tournament for the first time ever, and it allows us three international players. We'd love to recruit you." And the answer was immediately yes. I'm just a yes man like that, but I did kind of push my luck and I said, "Few questions. Can I also..." I had gone to their Instagram page and stocked the team and I was like, "Yeah, they need new jerseys." And so I'm like, "If I sponsor your jerseys, can I design them?" And they said yes.
So I got to redesign the jerseys. It was in a very cool way. I had my own company's logo on the chest. Anyways, going into this, I had no clue. Am I going to play it all? Am I going to start? Am I going to play 90 minutes? Am I going to play no minutes? I just didn't know. How good is my team going to be? All these were questions. I ended up ... The tournament was three games. I started all three games and I never subbed out. I'll give myself props. And pretty quickly on game one, prove to the coach I can play. And from that point on, I just never subbed out. And it was exhausting. Holy cow. This is the closest my body's ever come to just full on shutting down. I haven't run marathons and stuff like that, but this one put me to my limit and beyond.
Shelby Stanger:
And what do your kids think about that? I mean, they see you guys daily going for it, whatever that is. I mean, your wife put yourself out there. She wrote a book with Nat Geo. You guys have done a lot of things that are just out of your comfort zone.
Garrett Gee:
What was the one ... There was something the other day that ... It was wake surfing and I was trying to pull off a 360 and my kids have seen me try and fail for two years. And I eventually got it. And that was cool to see my kids see me succeed. But honestly, for me, the more important parenting lesson was them seeing me, how okay I was trying something and failing and failing and failing because my kids, I would say, it's hard for me to admit, but most blame to me, my kids I think are exceptionally hard on themselves and just have high expectations for themselves. And for me, it's not like I'm trying to just be a pushy parent, probably nobody is, but it's just like I just see so much potential and have so much faith in my kids.
I think they're just the greatest humans ever. And so definitely I'll admit my expectations for them are high in every way, whether it's like, I expect you to be great surfers or I expect you to be brave, or I expect you to be the most kind, lovely human ever. All of my expectations for them are high and that can be hard on them. So they get very frustrated when they fail. So anytime they can see me trying something and routinely fail, I appreciate it.
Shelby Stanger:
That's a good parenting tip, like fail in front of your kids. You really parent your kids differently than a lot of other people. It's really cool. You like to teach them about discomfort and adventure. Talk to me about some of the things that you've taught them so that they could be prepared on these travels.
Garrett Gee:
Yeah. When it comes specifically to important skills while traveling, a lot of it is funny because to an outsider who doesn't do extreme sports or this type of adventurous living, it might seem dangerous. Well, I know it seems dangerous to them because we get trolled in the comments constantly.
Shelby Stanger:
No, I've seen that. I'm like, no, this is actually really safe.
Garrett Gee:
Funny enough, the reason why we do it is for safety because it's like ... I always think back to this, when I grew up, I was next door neighbors with this kid whose mom would not let him leave his own driveway while riding his bike. And I mean, growing up in Utah back in '80s and '90s, I mean, we were riding our bikes everywhere. That was like life, that was childhood. And this kid couldn't leave his driveway, and so we'd just see him as we came and went. And guess who broke both his arms falling off his bike on his own driveway? It was that kid because he literally just didn't have the bike skills that we had. So much of what we push our kids to learn is actually for safety, because if you're in the ocean, how important is it to just be comfortable and know waves and swell and tides?
Free diving is one of the most important skills, I think, altogether in life, just because how much it's a balance of mind, body, and spirit that yeah, the body can only hold its breath as long as it can. The muscles and the lungs really don't change as much as your mind does. It's most of your progress that you make is because your mind changes. And so what a cool thing to train your mind and realize your abilities as a human, and how does that bleed into every other thing you do in life, realizing like, oh, I'm capable of so much more than I'm currently aware of. Because when you hold your breath for anything more than like 10 seconds, your instincts kick off and these alarms start going off in your brain being like, "I'm uncomfortable. I need air. I think I'm dying." When in reality you are not.
So having the mental capacity to override all those red alarms, that practice can take place in and out of the water.
Shelby Stanger:
What do you think your kids will say one day about how they grew up?
Garrett Gee:
Undoubtedly, they'll have endless stories of all their adventures. It's a beautiful thing to see how well they remember them, maybe and thanks to some of our videos that we've created, I think that'll be a treasure waiting for us once we get older. But still, a fun thing we'll do at dinner sometimes is like trivia. Last night, my daughter's like, "Will you give us some travel trivia?" They like me to ask questions about like, "Okay, where were we when Callie had a bot fly in bed into his head?" And so I'll give questions like that. They remember all of it. It's a really fun, beautiful thing.
But I also just hope that they realize how much me and Jessica have just tried to be like good mom and good dad. Just having a very beautiful home life is something that we've worked really hard at and most of the credit would go to Jessica of how special that is. And so hopefully the kids appreciate that as well.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. You guys sound like you're doing it right. What advice would you give to a parent listening to this podcast who's looking to have a wildlife?
Garrett Gee:
Ooh, good question. I think it's like don't put any limitations on yourself. Everyone can have the excuses of like, I can't leave the country or I can't afford this, or different things like that. And it's like there's so many adventures in your own backyard, adventures that are big and small. I mean, we're like a world traveling family, but there's a lot of families I look up to that are like a road tripping family or families that just go camping nearby and all of that. Whatever is your style of adventure, it can be done. And so just not putting excuses in the way of your dreams.
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to follow Garrett and his family's adventures, check out The Bucket List family on YouTube and on Instagram. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Thank you again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard. As always, we love when you follow the show. Take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.