The Family Wealth Edge

Our guest this week is the voice behind the new audiobook of Kristen’s own book, In Three Generations. Talon David is a Nashville-based professional narrator who has voiced more than 150 audiobooks, trained as a musician at Belmont, spent three years acting in London (including a turn on Bridgerton), and can carry upwards of a hundred distinct character voices in a single project. 

This one is a bit of a love letter to storytelling, which sits at the heart of everything we do with families.

What we get into:

• How an Instagram DM turned into the audiobook of In Three Generations, ten years after Kristen first published it
• What 150 books teach you about character archetypes, and how Talon finds a voice hiding inside the text itself
• The Bridgerton accent that started as on-set practice and became part of her craft
• Why a book about family enterprise written a decade ago still sounds like it was written yesterday
• The surprisingly curated story behind Talon’s own “neutral” voice, and what that says about the stories families pass down
• Practical advice for the many clients and listeners sitting on a book of their own, and why a narrator sends an audition first

You can find more about Talon on her website: https://www.talondavid.com/

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

Our guest this week is a dear friend of the show and, as Kristen puts it, a co-mentor through the messy work of shifting an entire industry. Amanda Koplin is a licensed mental health counselor and the founder and CEO of Koplin Consulting, a nationwide private-pay concierge behavioral health service, and she just released a new book making a real splash: The Trauma-Informed Trustee.

We dig into the part of family wealth that almost nobody is trained for: the human side of the trustee and beneficiary relationship. Amanda's point lands hard. The legal and financial piece of a trustee's job is the easy part. It's the human interaction that breaks people.

What we get into:

• Why the trustee often becomes the de facto parent, mentor, and authority figure in a beneficiary's life, and the transference that comes with it
• The Camden Wealth stat that 70 percent of ultra high net worth families report experiencing trauma, mental illness, or addiction, and why no estate planner is asking about it
• Why "Uncle Mike" as trustee can pour gasoline on an already fractured family, and how power dynamics destroy safe relationships
• What a certified hostage negotiator learned that applies directly to trustees and beneficiaries: both sides feel held hostage by who they think the other is
• The "same page chart" and why conflict usually comes from two people assuming they share beliefs they've never actually checked
• Equal versus equitable: the peanut allergy analogy every leading-gen parent should hear before writing their estate plan
• One message each for the leading generation, the beneficiary, and the trustee

Amanda's throughline: communication and compassion are the biggest risk mitigators there are. Find her on LinkedIn as Amanda Koplin LPC, at koplinconsulting.com, or grab The Trauma-Informed Trustee on Amazon.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome back and meet Amanda Koplin
 02:24 Amanda's journey: from her own recovery to this work
 04:04 The first trustee who said "I've never met anyone like you"
 04:57 What trustees face that no one prepared them for
 06:25 When the trustee becomes the parent figure
 08:18 The stats: trauma, mental illness, and addiction in wealthy families
 09:23 The questions estate planners never ask
 11:05 Should you name "Uncle Mike" as trustee?
 12:17 Eliminating power dynamics to preserve safety
 13:13 Why being seen, heard, and believed defuses crisis
 14:07 The advisor's own biases and trauma in the room
 15:06 When money papers over the problems
 16:10 A hostage negotiator's insight for trustees and beneficiaries
 17:58 The "same page chart" and questioning foundational beliefs
 19:22 How trauma patterns repeat across generations
 20:39 Trauma flows through generations, but so does healing
 21:08 Encanto as a lesson in generational healing
 23:23 The new dance move: one person choosing to change
 24:26 Three messages: for the leading gen, the beneficiary, the trustee
 24:59 Equal versus equitable: the peanut allergy analogy
 26:24 The trustee as guardian of your dreams
 28:13 Where to find Amanda and her book
 29:13 Wrap-up and goodbyes

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

Our guest this week spent 35 years across business, technology, and law enforcement, including nearly two decades as a police officer and nine years as a cybercrime investigator working major files with Europol and Interpol. Kenrick Bagnall now teaches the federal cybercrime investigators course for the RCMP, and he came on to talk about a threat most families badly underestimate.

Kristen sees it constantly: family members opening the shareholders' report on airport Wi-Fi, treating a business worth more than some countries' GDP like any other Gmail. Kenrick explains why a high net worth family is really a corporation with a much bigger attack surface, and what to actually do about it.

What we get into:

• Why cybercrime flows like water, straight to the path of least resistance
• How organized cybercrime groups run like real businesses, with HR, developers, and ransomware negotiators
• Why AI has killed the old giveaways, and how deepfake voices and video now defeat trust itself
• The single habit that stops most attacks: trust but verify, and the family safe word that backs it up
• Your digital footprint, active and passive, and how one vacation photo can geolocate your home
• Kenrick's five Rs framework: risk, reduction, resiliency, response, and recovery
• Why one tabletop exercise starts the work but preparedness is never one and done

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome back and meet Kenrick Bagnall
02:19 From IT in Bermuda to a Toronto cybercrime unit
05:40 Why tech now touches nearly every crime
08:00 When your data becomes the target
09:29 You've been hit by ransomware. Now what?
11:11 How a single report connects victims across continents
14:22 The perfect storm: rising awareness, rising sophistication
15:18 Why cyber criminals are now targeting families, not just corporations
17:33 A family office widens your attack surface
18:01 AI, deepfakes, and the end of "trust what you see"
19:44 Cybercrime flows like water
21:44 Trust but verify, and the family safe word
23:45 What law enforcement training teaches about preparedness
26:19 Cyber insurance and the cost of learning the hard way
27:39 Social media, privacy, and giving it all away
29:20 The digital footprint: active and passive
31:35 What a single posted photo can reveal
33:45 How Kenrick helps clients: the five Rs
36:57 Tabletop exercises for families
38:10 Preparedness as an ongoing responsibility
40:16 Where to find Kenrick
41:03 Wrap-up and goodbyes

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

This one's a bit of a family reunion. We brought almost the entire In3Gens coaching team into the studio, rising-generation family members who came through our peer groups as participants and came out the other side as coaches. Kristen gets to work alongside these people every day, and we wanted you to meet them.

We go around the table and each of them tells their story: where they started, the moment things clicked, and why they came back to help other rising gens do the same.

What we get into:

-Katie Darnall, a G4 from a Tennessee family business, on finding the missing puzzle piece in the in the peer groups and her confidence inside her own family system
-Eric Chaffiot, a G3 in Florida multifamily real estate, on the weight of juggling every role at once and learning to be part of something greater than himself
-Jamie Polanco who was adopted into a family and her transformative experience in the peer group as a safe space to finally ask "who am I and how do I tell the world?"
-Celine Fitzgerald, a G3 from Chicago, on coming in hot as a total skeptic and why she stayed
The turn from participant to coach, and what it means to find purpose through the work
Why a peer group of people who actually get it changes the whole experience

Curious about the rising-gen peer groups these coaches came through? Learn more and get in touch at inthreegenerations.com. 

If any of this sounds like the missing piece for you, now is the time to reach out. We'd love to help you figure out if coach training is the right fit.

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

We sat down with philosopher, coach, and punk rock drummer B. Scot Rousse for a conversation about the implications AI will have on our humanity.

What we get into:

• Why "what you want" is the most boring question you can ask about your life, and what to ask instead..
• Cognitive offloading: the quiet danger of outsourcing not just your emails, but your ability to think to machines
• The slot-machine loop, "AI slop," the traps hiding inside every chatbot
• An actionable four-part framework for a meaningful life in the age of the machine
• What raising kids with AI has in common with raising kids with wealth

You can follow B on Substack: https://withoutwhy.substack.com/

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

This is the last of our three-part live run from Vero Beach, and we're calling it Family Wealth Fixer-Uppers. Think of it a little like HGTV, but for families: there's a room in the house you've lived with unremodeled for ten years because you don't know where to start, and someone from the outside can walk in and immediately see what needs doing. We jotted down four scenarios we run into constantly with the families we work with, and talked through how we'd actually advise them.

00:00 Cold open
00:20 Welcome back 
00:42 What "Family Wealth Fixer-Uppers" 
02:10 Scenario 1: Rising-gen siblings won't come to the family meeting
02:34 Co-creating the agenda and making it fun
03:26 What we underestimate: careers, calendars, and what's really in the way
05:16 Scenario 2: Dad refuses to step aside
05:43 Founder's disease and identity after the business
06:23 Talking about risk what holding on too long actually costs
07:34 It's not stepping out, it's stepping up
07:54 Leave the jersey in a better place
08:40 Scenario 3: The rising gen who keeps going over budget
09:23 Why the missing context turns a trust into an ATM
10:06 Transparency paired with education
10:51 Scenario 4: Will telling them about the wealth kill their drive?
11:34 The grind isn't the only path to drive
12:32 How a lack of transparency creates the entitlement you feared
12:57 Wrap-up and thanks

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

It's our 25th episode and we're back together again!

In this episode, we play a round of Story Keep's card game, a deck built to spark honest, personal conversation. We ask each other about the motto we live by, the mentors who shaped us, the one song we'd take to a desert island, and the family holiday tradition we hold onto most. Special shout out and thanks to Jamie Yuenger and our friends at Story Keep and their recent symposium. 

StoryKeep: https://www.storykeep.com/

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

This one's special for us: it's the first episode we've ever recorded in person, together in the Florida sun, after four years of only seeing each other through a screen. To mark it, we wanted to do something playful, so we made a game out of our own lives. It's called "Whose Story Is It Anyway?", we read out a scenario from one of our pasts, hold up a sign for whose story it is (sometimes it's both of us), and then dig into what actually happened.

We get into the silver hand-me-down Porsche with no emergency brake that was a perfect metaphor for one of us at sixteen, why one of us was obsessed with the family business and the other never wanted anything to do with it, and how that business broke up a high school relationship. From there it gets more honest: becoming an inheritor at twenty-one with no preparation versus knowing too much too young and the rift it created with a sibling, the transparency tightrope every family walks, and being present at the moment a parent passed, something three of our four parents gave us. We close on the existential crises that family enterprise can set off, and the surprising gift that came from a father selling the company.

We're being playful with it, but underneath is the stuff we care about most: real responsibility, the weight people underestimate, and the reminder that whatever you're carrying, you're not alone in it.

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

This one's special for us: it's the first episode we've ever recorded in person, together in the Florida sun, after four years of only seeing each other through a screen. To mark it, we wanted to do something playful, so we made a game out of our own lives. It's called "Whose Story Is It Anyway?", we read out a scenario from one of our pasts, hold up a sign for whose story it is (sometimes it's both of us), and then dig into what actually happened.

We get into the silver hand-me-down Porsche with no emergency brake that was a perfect metaphor for one of us at sixteen, why one of us was obsessed with the family business and the other never wanted anything to do with it, and how that business broke up a high school relationship. From there it gets more honest: becoming an inheritor at twenty-one with no preparation versus knowing too much too young and the rift it created with a sibling, the transparency tightrope every family walks, and being present at the moment a parent passed, something three of our four parents gave us. We close on the existential crises that family enterprise can set off, and the surprising gift that came from a father selling the company.

We're being playful with it, but underneath is the stuff we care about most: real responsibility, the weight people underestimate, and the reminder that whatever you're carrying, you're not alone in it.

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge

What does it really cost to not have to work?

This week we discuss the paradox of comfort, the counterintuitive challenges that arise when financial wealth removes the necessity of working. It sounds like a dream. But for trust beneficiaries, next-gen family members, and anyone whose financial security has outpaced their sense of purpose, the absence of need can quietly erode confidence, identity, and readiness for life's inevitable responsibilities.
This is a conversation about redefining work — not as the way you pay the bills, but as the way you create meaning, build resilience, and show up for the world. And it comes with a practical framework: five coaching questions to help you (or your clients) get unstuck and design a life with intention.

Topics covered:

-The mental health costs of living without purpose-driven work
-Why identity and self-worth are so tightly tied to what we do
-Real responsibility: what happens when life demands it and you haven't built the muscle
-The pendulum problem in multigenerational families
-How to redefine success on your own terms

If you work with wealthy families, are part of one, or are simply thinking about what your relationship with work should look like, this one's for you.

Follow Kristen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legacy-coaching-llc/

Follow Vincent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentvaleri/

Watch Us On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFamilyWealthEdge