Chris J Snook - Wealth Matters

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Chris J. Snook for a second edition with us today. Uh, Chris is a wealth protection strategist. He builds, uh, agentic AI systems, uh, for regulated industries, high net worth individuals, and family offices. You can find out more about him at chrisjsnook.com. He's a best-selling author as well, has his own podcast. Chris, welcome. To the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

It's great to see you again, Charles, always. And congratulations, you're a new father. That's a— that's an awesome accomplishment. So yeah, welcome to that game. Uh, I have— I have 3 myself and very blessed with that. Um, so yeah, we've, uh, it's been an interesting time. We're doing a lot of new stuff, uh, on the, the Substack, which is at wealthmatterstome.com, and The Atomic Level, focused on the future of advice serving the knowledge gap and also the action gap for families that may not consider themselves to be sophisticated asset managers but that have something to lose. So our sweet spot target is families or individuals that have somewhere between, you know, $1.5 to $30 million in investable assets. I know that sounds like a big range, but that's really kind of what we call like the financial desert. It's, um, it's someone who's rich and has earned their way there either by benefiting from just the up and to the right move of the S&P over the last 15, 20 years and being a good steward of just socking some earnings away, or maybe they built it in a small business that they've had in the family for 30 years as a career. And, and so, um, they, they're wealthy, they have something to lose, they have asset appreciation, they own stuff, but they don't necessarily have access to certainly the advice of a family office, right, which would typically require you to have billions of dollars. And now we live in this world of AI where a lot of that intelligence has been democratized and it's available, but they don't necessarily know how to plug into that, how to protect themselves against it, whether they should care or not, you know. Um, and so we just, uh, we've brought that kind of down to earth and, and we bring those conversations and those playbooks to folks so that they can essentially have billion-dollar strategies with million-dollar assets. Um, and, uh, and that's what gets us out of bed every morning and, and what, what kind of keeps the—

what's the agentic part of it, um, Phil, that's been added in the last, uh, few years that we spoke about? Like, uh, how do you leverage agents to fulfill that mission?

Well, I mean, so that's an evolution as well, you know. The first thing is to really kind of understand that there's essentially two economies. And one of those economies is the one that we know very little about, but we've lived in for the last several hundred years, right? That's the human economy, or several thousand years if you want to think about it that way. Whether we're using seashells or US dollars or Bitcoin in the future, there's this human economy that's kind of been our experience, right? Transacting in marketplaces, goods, services, products, things like that. And now we live in this world where we've hit kind of a double exponential growth rate of essentially the token economy of the agentic economy, which is where machines are now doing commerce under the hood. We may not even see that, right? Non-organic or non-human life forms are now transacting in micropayments, milliseconds, 24/7, 365. And that economy of data and tokens wrapped around those transactions is one that people definitely don't understand. So if they don't understand how money works, then they definitely don't understand yet how token works. And it's not because they're ignorant or dumb, or it's not their fault. It's just that we're not aware of what we're not aware of. So, you know, when you think about the economy through those lenses, there's kind of this, oh, well, what about, you know, jobs? And is that going to go away? And, you know, at the end of the day, it really comes down to productivity growth. Whether or not you can service the debt, right, in the system, um, what the impacts are on the individual household, why the rich are getting richer, why the poor are getting poorer, or the middle class is evaporating and feels like they're just working their butt off to just stay afloat. And all these things are real dynamics, and that's what plays out in the human economy. And at the end of the day, the productivity in that economy has been dropping for 40, 50 years because We've had labor force participation rates and things like that that have slowed. And we have the largest, uh, generation ever in the boomers, right? Um, that are now in retirement age almost fully, and that will be over the next 10 to 15 years kind of moving on to wherever they move on to next. And that's leaving a transfer of $5 trillion a year in stuff Doesn't matter what the stuff is— stocks, bonds, real estate, properties, land, mineral rights. The numbers are $5 trillion a year is transferring from where it's owned right now to somewhere else. Now, there's going to be a lot of leakage. Some of that's going to go to grandkids, you know, idiot sons, everybody in between, ex-wives, whatever. Some of that's going to get leaked. Some of that's going to get confiscated. Some of that's going to get stuck in probate and this or whatever. Some of it will be taken by predators who come, you know, through all kinds of forms, the mobile phone, whatever, to kind of siphon it off. And, and so at the end of the day, you have this kind of very human problem called, you know, how do I not administer a nightmare? Because Gen X is not really the generation that worries about what they're going to get. Like, I'm in Gen X, you know, as an archetype, we were the first generation to really kind of understand whatever our parents were going to get, whatever these entitled are that we're paying on, probably not going to be there for us. And if they are, they're not going to be what we thought. And so we don't have this expectation as Gen Xers of getting stuff. Not that we won't say yes to it, but that's not our motivation. What we have is we have a younger generation who grew up digitally native, who is trying to find their way in a world where they're not really sure what the future looks like. Assets have become out of reach. There's more nihilism than ever. There's social media toxicity more than ever. There's anxiety at all-time highs, and those are our children. And so we're helping them kind of come of age. We're working harder to keep our own engine running. And then we have boomers on the other side who have the most wealth of any generation per capita. But for the most part, it's, it's not equally distributed, meaning the majority of Gen Xers don't have a parent who maybe owns their house free and clear. And if they do, there's not a lot of structure to it. And so what we're really worried about is administering and inheriting a mess. So that's the X. The boomer, if they have something to lose, wants to kind of do it right. But they live in a world that is analog because that's what they came up with. And so they're prudent about it. They care about it. They make decisions in a much slower turn. And this whole world doesn't interest them at all and shouldn't, quite frankly, because they're not going to be here by the time it really hits scale. So they're kind of thinking like, if I can just ride this out, I don't have to do anything. Let me just get, let me just get to death safely so I don't have to learn more about AI before it takes everything over. But they also are going to live longer, which is good, right? They're healthier. And then you have the Ys who, and the Zs down below, they're just trying to figure out if there's going to be a job for them, what it's going to be, you know, what relationships are going to look like, are they going to have kids, are they like all those things. And at the middle of that, you just have a speed of, of this emerging economy that no one can comprehend. Like, there'll be hundreds of agentic AIs working underneath every human, in every company, in every industry, no matter what. So even if AIs take jobs in the short run, they will create exponentially more jobs in the future. But not all those jobs will be distributed to humans, and they shouldn't be. Because they're not jobs meant for humans. There'll be jobs specifically purpose-built for an artificial intelligence that can work 24/7, 365 without an office. But then there'll be this human layer where we're still around and we still need stuff and we still want experiences and we still have roofs over our head. Like, we have to live in a building. We can't live outside. We, we can't live in the ether. Right? We have to eat. That takes water, that takes energy. So you have these weird times and most people are just confused by it. And yet money never sleeps. And so how do you protect yourself? How do you do it? So that's, that's kind of what we're in the middle of.

Do you see a future for normal human beings? I mean, the 1% will keep on getting richer, like savages will be savages, you know, like we'll keep on getting richer, I feel, and have competition. But I can't see a world in which normal people are successful without, uh, UBI, or not successful but like can survive without UBI?

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I don't, I don't know that the weeds of that are really clear to anybody. I mean, we can pontificate. At the end of the day, you know, human beings have always found a way to be human. Like, we're human, right? So we are going to remain human, which means we are going to uniquely be curious. We are going to uniquely want to experience things. We're going to treasure, I think, in new ways being around each other more. You know, I think the most human we'll ever be is in the next 5 to 10 years. And at the same time, we are living in this polar world where it's kind of like a barbell economy, right? There's the automation of everything that's happening over the next 5 to 10 years. And there's the disintermediation and disruption of everything, including money itself, over the next 5 years, 10 years max. And then there's this superhuman kind of need state, persistence, and opportunity that will also grow in premium. This will be the scarce asset. Like, what's not going to be scarce is agentic AI. Like, what will be scarce is 8.2 billion humans. And, and that's never been the case, right? Intelligence was always the scarce thing, and then humanity was always kind of the abundant thing because there's 8.2 billion of us, and there was 1.7 billion of us the last time we were 100-year turn, right? And so we've kind of grown in population. So we think of ourselves as abundant because there's 8.2 billion of us. But at the end of the day, there'll be trillions of agentic AIs, which means at some point the scarce human becomes an interesting premium. And, and so I'm bullish on the human experience becoming more human. I'm bullish on local. I'm bullish on small business. I'm bullish on Taste, context, you know, coordination and trust. Those are the 4 things that you and I get to own in the future that will be very valuable. We don't get to own anything else because everything else will be a commodity. And that's OK, because taste, like the style, the way that you do a thing, is, is up to you and I to decide. A machine doesn't decide that for us. You and I decide that, you know, context, like how I make it relevant for Charles in his specific use case. AI is going to allow me to do that because I won't have to be generic anymore. I'll be able to really personalize every interaction. With just you. So as a customer experience, I get to work on that. Coordinating all this complexity into simple things that a human can understand, that's going to be a premium. You're going to get paid really well if you can do that in any market, right? Because complexity is beyond our ability to understand it today, and it's only going to get worse. And so those who can orchestrate and coordinate will have value, and that's a very human thing to be able to do, um, with AI as your kind of lever. And to do it at scale. And then lastly, trust. Like, we're writing a lot now about how you can automate everything but trust. And the deposits of attention that people pay are going to transform from kind of just droned-out noise to like intention-based long-form relationships that build trust that can be lost in a nanosecond. But those who have the trust will command the market. And that's a very human thing.

Right, random tangent, um, yeah, I see that you're in Web3 and Welt. I've been studying a bunch of, uh, great entrepreneurs or internet personalities, and it seems that a very good chunk of them lost a lot of money in crypto, right? Like they promoted X NFT or got involved with the wrong project. What do you have to say about this?

Um, I mean, you know, the thing that's hard, right, is not seeing the inevitable. So like if you look through the lens of what's inevitable, I think what I just talked about was inevitable. You're gonna have more and more human-to-human interaction because for the last 15 to 20 years, we really haven't been human, right? Like we got to a place in mobile web and Web2 and like connectivity where we connected more people than ever,. But we also dehumanize the whole thing because it's very algorithmic. It was an advertising industrial complex. It polarized this left and right or up and down, like however you want to look at it. And it's very inhuman. And all of us are suffering because of that. Like all of us, I don't care what generation, we're all tired of going to a restaurant and like no one can, no one can do anything. No one knows anything. We go to, you know, a hardware store and no one knows where a thing is. And if they look at the phone, like it's very inhuman. Whereas 20 years ago, if you went into a gas station, asked for direction, the guy knew the entire state. Could be like, oh, make a left here, make a right there. Now it's like, no, just look it up on GPS. So I think we move back to a very human experience. And then I also think that on the other side of that, the inevitable thing is productivity will improve. It'll probably wash out the debt burden that everybody's worried about over time because we're gonna hit that scale of agentic AIs doing a lot more work than they are now. So the productivity will actually show up, which is lagging right now. And that'll solve some of that and create opportunities for maybe UBI or some of those things you're talking about. At the end of the day, though, none of that matters if what you're trying to think about is, where do I allocate capital in the next 6 months, 5 years, 3 years? Like, what's going to go up? What's going to go down? There's no question to me that crypto is inevitable. Which crypto? I'm not going to say. If you ask me to bet, I'll tell you where my bet is. It's in Bitcoin, because it's one of a kind. And you can look at the price, but again, if you look at the price, you're trying to convert a deflationary hard asset to an infinitely debased fiat swap. I don't care if it's euros, dollars, whatever, right? If you look at Bitcoin like there's only 21 million of them, that's all there's ever going to be, and one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, then you just go, do I own a Bitcoin or not? If you look at Bitcoin like it's $60K or it's $126K, then you're, then you're looking at a price action on an asset, but you're not really looking at the value of the asset. So people that say, well, Bitcoin doesn't do anything. Okay. You can have that opinion, but that doesn't mean you're right. And conversely, I could say it does something like I could say it's permissionless, which is a unique characteristic. It's borderless. It's infinitely accessible. It can be stored in your head or on a cold storage. Like you don't need anyone's permission to send it. Receive it, take it with you, and you can put as much wealth that you want to have available to you in there as you choose or not. And you can leave wherever you are. So if you're like— you can't do that with land, you can't do that with a house in California if they change the rules on you, you can't do that with guns and ammo and seeds, you can't carry gold that far. But you could put $5 million, $500,000 $30K, you could put whatever you want in Bitcoin equivalent and not worry about what the dollar equivalent is. Just know you have Bitcoin. I have 1, I have 2, I have 3, I have 10, I have several hundred thousand like Michael Saylor, and you could take it with you. And so, you know, when you look at like what happened in Iran before the war and people are getting shot in the street, Bitcoin in Iranian money went to like 4.7 million a token in a matter of days. Right now, it didn't move over here like that. But why did it move over there? Because you couldn't— your money became worthless. The regime was falling. The regime was shooting people. No one wanted their dollars outside of those borders and no one wanted to stay in those borders. So the only way you could get out of there was to pay somebody in something other than their money. So their money became worthless. And what, what was borderless? What was permissionless? What couldn't be frozen? Bitcoin. So what happened to Bitcoin in Iranian money? It got priced to whatever the market was. And at one point it was 4.7 million Iranian whatevers. Per Bitcoin. And so we don't think about it that way because we're here, we're spoiled, we're in the US dollar hegemony or the North American continent, right? And we don't have those issues every day. So there is a utility to it and you should have some, in my opinion. Machines, bots are never going to transact in dollars, period. Like, they might transact in stablecoins, which are dollar equivalents, you know, backed by US Treasuries. Which is why stablecoins exist, because you can't send money 24/7, 365 over fiat bank rails. Like, Chase is closed on July 4th. Your agent doesn't give a shit, right?

Right.

So, I mean, crypto as a mechanism, as a technology, is inevitable. Which coins are there? Will NFTs be there? NFTs are non-fungible locations on a blockchain. That's what they are. They're not art, they're not anything. They're a token that is uniquely one of one, and they point to a location on a distributed ledger technology called blockchain or whatever where that thing of value actually is. And if you own that, then you own the location of the thing of value. You own the wrapper around the thing of value. So value is in the eye of the beholder. Is it worthless? Maybe, but 100 years from now, it could be worth more. The point is, are you buying it to get rich quick, or are you buying it because you have some underlying need? And then, you know, same with everything else. Like, we'll probably have a pause in AI and CapEx spending and whatever because we're spending a ton, but inevitably we have to spend even more. And no one's going to stop this arms race because if you stop this arms race, your country never catches up. So there is no end to AI. There's no end to CapEx. There's no end to that. But there are finite constraints on tungsten rock or silicon or chips or memory. And so there's these cycles where capital will rotate out of an asset class into another one. And these toll booths that are inevitable will have volatility. So yes, it is going to be volatile, but it ends in the same place. And if you're investing long-term, you invest in the things that create that inevitability. You buy the shovels and stop chasing the gold rush.

Yeah, like Bitcoin vs. NFTs, right? And I guess that's when having thoughtful advisors matters, right? If you can think of all these guys that have been in trouble with NFTs— Floyd Mayweather, Shaq, and, uh, like other celebrities, right? Like, you feel you don't really— they don't really have people to advise them. On this, right, legally. And this is an ambiguous, uh, field, right? You don't know necessarily if NFTs are legal. It's, uh, it's all about the future decision and knowing how the government moves its pieces and trying to predict where you will fit on that map. And these guys obviously didn't have— didn't think enough about that or didn't hire people for, for this.

Um, well, one of the frameworks I'll give everybody, a very clear visual, this comes from Charlie Garcia, who's a phenomenal phenomenal guy to follow or read on Substack. And I interviewed him on the show a couple of months back. We're going to have him back again. But he wrote a piece recently and he said, I want to own toll booths, not hot dog stands. So think about this. If you're going to invest in something, whatever it is, your job is you're putting your money to work because there's only two ways to make money. Simple, right? Me at work or my money at work. It's the only two ways you can make money. And so when you're investing, what you're really doing is you're saying, I'm choosing now to not work or in parallel to me working to create money. I'm putting my money to work. So that it can make more of itself. So when you're investing, that's the goal. And if you think of it like a freeway, right? Everybody's got a freeway in wherever they live. And if you were driving on the busiest freeway you can imagine and there was a hot dog stand right on the exit, well, guess what? That's probably got a business. Why? Because people get hungry driving. And if it's on the freeway, it's easy to just pull off get a hot dog and start driving again. So there's people that will transact with that. But what's the problem with a hot dog stand?

I mean, there's competition there. Yes, it's fast food and people are moving away from fast food.

Well, not even— forget the food quality. Just assume hot dogs are the only piece of meat that you can eat and it's healthy for you. Forget that, right? Just if someone puts a hot dog stand on the freeway, the moat around that business being the only game in town is very thin because as soon as it starts to get traffic, someone is going to see that there's another side of the road that they could put a hot dog stand on. So now you have two hot dog stands. So you're generating— you're benefiting from traffic, but you're not guaranteed to capture the revenue because more competition could come up. People could switch from salad to— or from hot dogs to salad, to your point, right? And all of a sudden, like, now the traffic is still there, but you're not guaranteed to capture the revenue from it. Whereas a toll booth You have no choice. So when you're looking at something, I don't care if it's a token, a coin, a crypto, whatever, you have to ask, is this a toll booth or a hot dog stand? That's what Charlie says. And it's a great analogy because, you know, both make money, but once one's following traffic and one is basically mandating, you're like, you can't be on that freeway if you don't pay the toll. So one's guaranteed revenue and it's guaranteed the monopoly on it. And so when you think about these investments moving forward, just run it through, is it a toll booth or is it a hot dog.

And talking, making that same analogy with your business, what is your moat?

The moat that we're building is, is trust. That's the moat.

With podcast, newsletter, giving value before you ask.

Well, not only that, but just so everyone— I think this is an interesting time for people over 50. Personally, I'm not certain of this, but I think the probability is you're going to see people over 50 do well in ways that they may not have thought they would.

Right.

And the reason why is because they have something that a 25-year-old doesn't have. A 25-year-old has a lot of things they can run with, too. So a 25-year-old has the same value, or an 18-year-old has the same opportunity set, but different reasons. They don't— they have the energy, they have the fearlessness, they have less to lose, they have more Autonomy. They like— so that's what you get when you're young. So everybody goes, oh man, you know, this is a game for the young. Well, okay, but where is it a game for the older? And the over-50 set has something called 25 years of experience doing a thing. They have 25 years' worth of a reputation that you don't get in 25 nanoseconds. And they have 25 years of relationships. They have 25 years of context. Right? They've made mistakes. They've learned. They have things that you just don't get except for being around a long time. And those things are, are things that AI can't knock off. Like AI could reproduce this, me and you, and fake everybody out for a minute. Right? Like it could. Like for all anybody watching this knows right now is this isn't actually Chris and this isn't actually Charles. This is our avatars. Because in 6 months, they'll be that good. Right? If not already. In 6 months, we don't need to even be here. To have this conversation, because my brain could just generate my name, image, and likeness, and your brain could do the same. We could fool everybody. But why would they know it's still me? Why would there be trust in it? Because I've been doing it for 20 years. Because they can look back when there was none of that, and they could see the same voice and tone. They could see similar concepts. They could see the evolution. So I'm leaning in heavy on that, and I'm telling everybody to lean in on that. Like, your biggest asset is you've been around, because that can't be faked.

Right, yeah. Um, I think AI, one, there will be like regulations like you've mentioned, so, but that will come only in like a year or two when the government— it's funny how the government never like acts fast enough, right? They always react when it's too late. They don't have incentives to react before. That's one. And two, I would say AIs would be way more conservative, right? They wouldn't crack jokes, they wouldn't say the F-word, for example. They won't— they wouldn't be like weird. They won't take risks, right? Because the user might be like, hey, that's not me. Why is the AI saying that? So I think companies will build around that user experience.

Well, and we, you know, we work in regulated industries very specifically with our stack of services and solutions because regulated industries have to, like, if you do things wrong, you go to jail or you get fined. Like, there's, there's something at stake, right? And, um, so we found that, and they also, they have a lot of private data. And so when you think about like that stack of value, um, you want to own your system of intelligence. This is the thing I'm telling everybody, regardless of what they're in. You have to understand that intelligence is different than any other thing we've ever democratized in this one simple way. It doesn't disrupt one industry at a time. When we, when we started, when we like dematerialized content from Napster back in the '90s, we disrupted music and basically film., right? Because now an MP3 or MP4 could be, you know, put out there wild, pirated, and you could download it for free. And it broke a whole business model, but it didn't destroy healthcare. It didn't, like, it didn't wipe out white-collar jobs. It didn't, it didn't change every industry. It changed one industry very materially, and then for a decade, and then, like, it kind of invented new things, right? And so when you think about this disruption, it's horizontal, it's not vertical. Intelligence is— the closest thing we've ever had to it would be electricity. And, and, but now we're talking about it's not just electricity, it's not just power, it's, it's cognition. It's the ability to think and reason and execute all at once. And when you horizontally put that against all industries at one time, there's no one that escapes the value and the opportunity in that, but also the disruption that it brings because it can do everything at once. It doesn't have to like focus on one industry and then the other industries get to learn and go, well, let's avoid that. And in regulated industries, they have to kind of move careful, but also they can't ignore it and they know it. And so it's just, it's an easier conversation 'cause you tend to look at it a little bit more seriously and holistically because you kind of know I can't violate these things. I need to keep this data safe. I can't have it out on the frontier models, but I also need the power this because I can't fall behind. National security, I have all these other things, uh, client data, financial services, whatever. Like, yeah, so a kid on Twitter is building a prediction markets bot that makes them half a million dollars in 3 days. How am I gonna have a job in the future? Well, you're gonna have a job because not everybody can do that. Plus, that's still a casino. Most people aren't interested in that gambling with their retirement. And number 3, like, that's always been available. It's just now more available to someone who doesn't have to have billions of dollars worth of institutional infrastructure, and yet humans still have jobs. And the reason they still have jobs is because when I have someone dying or going to college, I want to have a conversation. I want empathy. I want something from you that's going to make me feel good about whatever decision I'm going to make. Yeah, that's a very human thing.

Yeah, I just— side note on that kid making multi-million, like, most of the time it's fake PR. And second, even if it's true, it's like they're at the very top of the, the hype and money and What we don't see is like the downfall right after, right? Like, that's a reality for people.

You never see that. You never see the account, you know, like you only hear about that person when, when it's working. You don't— you know, there's not a feed that shows you 24/7 when they—

good example is MedVie, right? Not sure if you've studied that company, but it was like New York Times headlines. GLP-1 middleman, you could call that company. The headline was One Man Billion Dollar Company, and that's been all the hype in Silicon Valley. And yes, it will happen, right? Like one person with a bunch of agents scaling hyper rapidly. But what the article didn't mention is that this company was under scrutiny, right? Like of the FDA and shit's about to hit the fan for them, right? So they portrayed them at the very hype.. And yeah, you're going to see like the real-time downfall of obviously the founder invests in lots of PR so that the world doesn't really realize. But yeah, I think, and that trends well with GLP-1s, right? Like what is GLP-1? GLP-1 is people seeking the easy road. And I'm— there's like very noticeable side effects of GLP-1s. It messes up your gut and the gut is pretty much everything. Whether it's your brain, whether it's your health, right? And when you like fuck with this, you're, you're not gonna get good effects down the line, right? And that tells a lot about where humanity is going.

Yeah, I think, I think this is why, again, and it's not because I'm a very pragmatic optimist, but I'm an optimist. And I, and I just think, you know, why again, why I'm bullish for the 50s and up, I'm bullish for the 25s. I think there's different concerns, but the 50s and up, like You know, they can tell you money doesn't— it's not that money can't rent happiness. It'll rent happiness, but it will not buy you meaning. So, like, our metrics have to change. And I don't say that because, like, I'm getting on a soapbox. I'm saying they will change because we've already seen what they're not delivering, right? We have more anxiety at levels. We have more anger underneath the surface in society than ever. And yet we have more money than ever. Like, we're doing better than any set of humanity has ever done. At a broad scale. And yet, most people, if they're honest, are more anxious than ever, are not as happy as they'd like to be. And so you go, OK, well, let's fix it with UBI. All right. Assume you have UBI and everybody can afford their bills, whatever that means. You think that's going to make them happy? No, it'll give them one less thing to worry about. It's not going to give them meaning. We get meaning from contributing and growth. Those are the only two places we get meaning. Right. And so if we're not growing in what we're learning and what we're curious about and what we're like as a human, then we're, we're, we're basically dead and just breathing. And if we're not contributing somewhere to something that has something bigger than just a number attached, then we're feeling this emptiness because at some point you'll have more money than you could ever spend and you'll have bought everything you ever thought would make you feel that way. And once you've done those two things, if you're fortunate enough to get there, you realize you got to the mountaintop and you're not happy. And so, I focus on protecting net worth and net happiness because I constantly bring us back to the real wealth is in the sweet spot of those two things. It's being financially liquid enough to do the things without compromise, to live a life of experiences and benefit whoever you want to benefit that matters to you. And at the same time, not at the trade of your underlying net happiness and the meaning that you give, because humans are very uniquely meaning makers. That's what we do. We turn everything into a meaning. This soccer game, won or lost, it means something to us, right? And so I just, I think that that's what I mean when I'm bullish humanity. I'm saying we're going to get back to what's meaningful.

Yeah. In one sentence, like, you can't stop the the acceleration of thermodynamics, you know, like from a very physics and, uh, first principles basis. Like, there's this thing called thermodynamics, and we need to accelerate towards something. We can't really stop, you know. But once we stop, we get stillness. There's been a bunch of people throughout history that have been good at doing that. I guess that's death, right? But it's like, uh, deep meditation and so forth. You do feel the lack of noise, the absence of noise, that can feel good. But seems like we're hard-coded towards acceleration and just doing stuff, right? So even if we crack the code 99.9%, we're gonna seek that, uh, 0.09% extra acceleration, right? So it's like our human nature. Chris, where can people find out more about you?

Best places, uh, you know, go to the newsletter. There's— you can subscribe for free with just your email address, wealthmatters2me.com. I, I do live streams multiple days a week. I interview some of the best people on the planet, rising stars of finance, top 100. Um, if you're looking to make money in the markets in any kind of asset class, I've either had them on the show or we'll have them on the show. You get that all for free just for subscribing. And the Atomic Level syndicates out from there to all the other podcast players, so you can find it anywhere else. But that's where I always do the drops. And then that's where I do the long-form writing. So, you know, that's the easiest, best place to go is wealthmatterstome.com and join the Substack. If you want to upgrade, you can. It's a couple of bucks, you know, a year basically. So that's where I'd love to get in conversation with you and bring, you know, some of these people to life. And then we can figure out, You know, if there's an opportunity to serve people further from there, we'll figure that out.

But as Chris and Charles from