Season 2, Episode 5: Brandon Hatton on Wealth, Nourishment, and the Gut Check

Season 2's guest conversations begin with Brandon Hatton, founder of Conscious Wealth in Atlanta and a longtime friend of both hosts. He was told only that he'd be asked about inflection points, so he spent the weeks before walking around town thinking about his.

What happens when "Hatton" becomes "Brandon"?

His biggest inflection point, he says, was going from Hatton to Brandon. In high school he was a three-sport athlete with two state championships and his name in USA Today. At 18, he realized he wasn't good enough for college sports and had to reinvent himself. He found a love of learning in college and became a high school teacher, a calling he loved. He was against business and money, partly because he'd never had either.

After seven years, he burned out, tried photography, and landed at Merrill Lynch, which he describes as the belly of the beast. That's where he realized he had lost what he used to care about: community, people, and impact. The road back wasn't rejecting business. It was bringing those values into it. Today Conscious Wealth has five advisors, a physical space, supper clubs and salons, a relational wealth practice that helps families have hard conversations about money, and a membership community. Fred compares it to Steve Jobs connecting the dots looking backward.

In between came cruise ships, then opening a school in Egypt, then jobs in Lebanon and Brazil. He had never left Ohio except for Disney World and Niagara Falls, and had never tried espresso. His advice to anyone in their twenties: don't worry about money, just live.

Where does confidence come from?

Brandon credits his sports days with an ethic of excellence. They weren't allowed to spike the ball or trash talk, and they helped up the kids they knocked down. Still, he can't fully account for his confidence and calls it a gift, not something he earned. Fred brings in conation, the inborn talent you don't remember learning, and reminds us that you can't read the label from inside the jar.

Now, every trip Brandon takes has a purpose. In Japan, it was architecture. In Ireland, it was walking: four to six hours a day past farms, cliffs, cows, and sheep, with Thich Nhat Hanh's How to Walk in his bag. He says he worked through every old grudge on foot, including a fifth-grade teacher, and came home a kinder leader.

What's your earliest money memory?

Fred first met Brandon at a workshop where he asked a question Fred had never heard from a financial advisor: what's your earliest money memory, abundance or scarcity? Brandon says the same memory can lead one person to scarcity and another to abundance. When a client thanked him for taking them on despite having less money than their relatives, he pointed out the other kinds of wealth they had: family, career, health, and community. Without those, money doesn't feel good. Trouble starts when we ask money to fill the other buckets.

Building the community, Conscious Wealth made a choice. Instead of bringing opposites together to bridge divides, they gather "like-hearted" people who may vote differently but want good things for everyone. Brandon's highest compliment came from a client who left a big Wall Street firm and said, "I feel like somebody's finally treating me like I'm smart."

Why step off the stage?

At the end of 2025, Brandon decided to stop seeking speaking gigs. He loves being on stage, but afterward came the flight home, the exhaustion, and the loneliness. He doubled down on Atlanta, where he interviews others instead of being the center. He calls the shift liberating.

On decisions, he and a teammate recently faced two lucrative paths and could only take one. Head and heart liked both, so they asked their guts and landed on the same answer. Kristina notes that most people only feel their gut as fear, while Brandon reads his as energy. If something doesn't give him energy, he won't do it, no matter what it pays.

What do you do on a bad day?

He used to hide like an injured cat. Now he does two things. He treats exercise as a sensory experience, like running at sunrise and feeling the light. And he reaches out. Conscious Wealth's relational work rests on the idea that patterns formed in relationship have to change in relationship. He has three friends in Atlanta who would drop everything for him, and he'd do the same.

On a recent low day, he forced himself out on his bike, got coffee, still didn't feel right, bought ice cream sandwiches at Trader Joe's, and ate three in front of the TV. One day is fine, he says. A week might be a problem. He built a life on ignoring his body and is unlearning it. Fred made a note about the ice cream sandwiches.

Is luck just flow?

Kristina argues that luck is flow. Follow your passion and energy and you'll hit more lucky breaks. Brandon pushes back: the inverse isn't true. Plenty of people do everything right and don't strike it rich, and he worries about what he calls "success porn" and its effect on young adults. Kristina adds that Brandon has a knack for sensing the wave, like going to Japan the year before everyone else did. Fred ties it back to alignment, and to a line he attributes to Stephen Covey: what is most personal is most general.

What's he reading?

Elaine Feeney's How to Build a Boat, especially the teacher who loves a boy so hard she gives him boundaries. His gateway book was Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love. The one he's listened to many times over is Wayne Dyer's The Power of Intention: think abundance, act abundantly, become abundance.

Find Brandon at consciouswealth.com.

Listen to the full episode of The Executive and the Mystic on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.