Full Throttle Leaders Podcast - Chris Snook - Episode 6

All right, good morning everybody, good afternoon, or whenever you're watching it. Um, this is Full Throttle Leaders. It's a podcast that we talk to leaders in the— a lot of mostly the services or the tech space. Um, today we got Chris Snook, and is it called Atomic? Is that— or is that Atomic?

That's right. All right, an IQ.

IQ, because you got to have IQ. That's right, that's right. So I'm Michael Filato. Like I said, um, um, I basically do these to get to know people, why they're where they're at today. It also helps drive PR for both companies. My company does lead generation, we do like podcasts and roundtables and masterminds and stuff like that. Tell me a little bit more about your company.

Yeah, we're an alternative asset manager. We have a couple of different divisions. We have an advisory arm which does fractional chief growth or chief AI officer type strategic development for small and medium-sized businesses, family offices, and high net worth individuals, typically like closely held businesses. And then we have a venture studio, which is where we build and bring to market our own suite of agents and technologies, things like that. And then I write a newsletter and have a media business, uh, that lives under the Wealth Matters 3.0 brand that, um, does podcasts like Atomic Level and, uh, writes a newsletter on Substack that's growing called Wealth Matters 3.0.

Um, which one do you love the most to do?

Well, they, they all kind of serve a purpose. I mean, I love to write, I love to communicate, I love to educate myself, and then by proxy try and see how well I understand something by being able to explain it to others so that they can understand it. So that's, that's something that I find myself always gravitating towards. And then the curiosity is just kind of innate in me, so I've just always been a builder. Whether I like it or not. Um, and so, you know, I enjoy the creative process. I enjoy building. I enjoy, uh, you know, breaking, breaking old models and building new ones. And so, um, it just depends on the time of day.

You've been doing your podcast for 18 years?

Uh, I've been doing a version of it for, um, probably 15-ish years. Um, it's take— it's— there's been several different ones. The latest, um, the latest one, which lives under the Atomic Level banner, um, is brand new. I mean, we're— we got 8 episodes in the can, I think, that need to go out in the next 7 days. And I think we have 10 out there live right now as we're recording this. Um, and that one's— so that's like the latest iteration of me, but I've been talking forever.

Are you from San Diego your whole life, or were you— where were you born?

It depends on the year you ask. I was born and raised in, um, New Jersey. There's a bridge called Trenton Makes, the World Takes, and the world took me, thankfully. Um, I moved out west late '90s for grad school, so spent about 15 years in San Diego. Um, moved to Colorado for a couple, uh, been in Arizona for about 10. And, um, you know, that all over. Um, lived in, lived in Estonia for a little while back in 2018. Um, lived in Costa Rica. So from everywhere. I've got friends everywhere.

Would you say agentic AI systems are kind of like the one of the top things that you do?

Well, I think, you know, that's the soup of the day, but I, I think, um, I say that not, not jokingly. I mean, we hit an inflection point January 27th specifically, that I've analogized as the 28th day of the singularity. If anybody's ever done the, the penny doubled for 30 days exercise, or been asked, would you take a million dollars right now or a penny doubled for 30 days, choose, they know what I mean when I say the 28th day. It doesn't, it doesn't compute as a good decision until you get to like the 25th, 26th, 27th day, and you could start to see what that doubling means, right? So human minds think linearly. We evolve over millions of years. You know, the Cambrian explosion was 541 million years ago, which gave life to us, basically the primordial ooze. I believe we're in a Cambrian 2.0 explosion right now, which, um, you know, yesterday I was interviewing a guy who's got a startup about 7, 8 years in, does treasury, corporate treasury management, uh, technology platform, and is a licensed SEC-registered fiduciary, RIA. And I was asking him about his view of where we go from here. And, you know, as an example, this is a company that has 7 full-time employees and 75 agents internally, AI agents that they've built over the last year. And so if you think about that as a— that was before we had OpenClaw, you know, kind of go viral and anybody—

OpenCraw?

OpenClaw.

What's that?

So this will be— so everyone should rapidly start to go to Perplexity or their favorite engine, answer engine, and say, what is OpenClaw and why should I care? That's your homework for today. But OpenClaw was an open-source project that went from zero to a multi-billion-dollar exit solopreneur. We don't know what the number was in about 88 days. And what OpenClaw, it was, so if you're on X, formerly Twitter, your feed's gonna be inundated the minute you follow one of these things. But in the vacuum that I live in, that's all I see right now. And so, but why OpenClaw mattered is most people are familiar with the frontier models like OpenAI or Google Gemini or Claude by Anthropic. And they've been in this race heating up to deploy and ship, you know, better models, better, faster code development, all kinds of things. And that's kind of been happening in, in one silo of like just AI explosion. And you hear all this world about, oh, everything's going to change when we hit singularity, where we have the dumbest agent as smart as the smartest human. And then, you know, 12 months later, basically The dumbest agent smarter than all humanity. That, that explosion in intelligence is also now an explosion in non-human identities, right? It's, it's agents, it's, it's AIs that are doing specific tasks and can work 24/7, you know. And, and what happened on January 27th is Open Claw kind of went viral because, um, it originally started as a project called MaltBot— or I'm sorry, ClaudeBot. And, um, because it was spelled closely to Claude by Anthropic, it got cease and desisted and threatened to be sued. And so it changed the MaltBot out of desperation to find something that wouldn't slow the project down about 45, 50 days in. And then his GitHub repository got sniped and he lost everything and it kind of spilled out into the wild. And then he renamed it OpenClaw. So that's been named OpenClaw now for about the last 30 days. But what it does is it allows essentially you to have an open source publishing platform for agentic AI. I mean, that's the simplest way to explain it. So imagine being able to, on your own Mac Mini, or which took off at scale, so Apple stock is gonna ride this wave because now people are buying Macs because they have a unified memory kind of piece that other computers don't have. So you can run local AI now, um, using something like OpenCLaw. There's other different derivatives of it now because it's been forked and open source, but, but essentially this OpenCLaw movement unlocked this absolute explosion in how people will organize a business, launch a business, automate their day. And, and so it's less than 60 days in. I mean, we're, we're looking at the penny doubling, you know, at day 28 becomes $1.6 million, $3.2, you know, and then whatever, right? $5, whatever it ends up being, like almost $6 million by 31. And so if you think about that in terms of intelligence and the capability set it means for everybody, entrepreneurs, leaders, business owners, and then the ultimate risk vector that it also opens up, new security attacks, things that haven't been patched, things that you can't understand, people have to get caught up with. It's both exciting and frightening at the same time.

Do you sleep at night without going through 80 million ideas in your brain?

You know, it's funny. It's not funny.

You've got all this information and it's like, it's like sometimes the way above what people are going to understand.

Because I think, I think that's the biggest challenge right now is that, you know, there's two sides of it. There's like the, there's the piece of like you didn't know what you didn't know, right? And so when you don't know what you don't know, you can kind of live with what we call ignorance is bliss to some degree, right? Because you wake up, the sun comes up, sun goes down, your kids, your family, whatever, they're where they are. You kind of go to the bagel store, the bagel store is still there, the coffee shop's still there. Like you go, okay, I don't understand how things could change that much. And in some ways they won't, right? But then in other ways they are fundamentally in a way that we can't like understand. And the easiest way to think about it is, you know, think about your life 10 years ago, what you drove and what your car did or didn't do, what your phone did or didn't do. I mean, 10 years ago was not long ago. And yet, if you buy a 2026 car versus a 2016 car, They're completely different vehicles, right? Like the computing in them, the sensors in them, the, you know, to the point where I don't even want to buy a new car anymore for the first time in 20 years, right? I just bought a 2011 5 Series because I just don't want the next greatest thing, right? So there's like this weird dichotomy.

I have the new Corvette and I love it. I love all the tech.

Well, and pretty soon it'll be driving you, right? So the, you know, the, um, the point is that like if you go 10 years from there, 2016 back to '06, we didn't even have the iPhone. So if you think about how much has changed in the last 20 years, you know, we like, we can go, wow, that, that like, what was my life like before the iPhone? Don't remember. Um, because we're so dependent on it now, right? We order our food through it, we order our dates through it, we do everything through it. And so that wasn't something that you could have predicted. That's not something that people saw coming. And that's something that the majority of people get drug into, meaning like some people lead into a new phase shift and other people just get drug in and they get drug in because the UX improves and they don't even realize they're being drug in, right? Facebook was That's the example of that. Next thing you know, all your photos are online and your facial recognition and everything else, and you've lost all sense of privacy and agency. But you thought, hey, I was connecting with people. So this is like that on steroids. And the scary part is nobody can keep up with it. So what do you do about it? Well, as a human, when you can't keep up with something, the first thing you do is you accept that limitation. Right? That's the simple— you have to accept— we have to accept our limitations. So to your point, do I sleep at night? Yes, I sleep really well. Because I accept that there is no way I can keep up with my own brain, let alone the amount of changes.

You're pretty close to keeping up with it, it seems like.

Well, I can tell you firsthand, if I wanted to be overwhelmed by how much I feel like I need to learn while I execute, it would be very easy to do.

Yeah.

And so I say that with all the empathy in the world for those who, you know, think faster than me, for those who think slower than me. Like, I say that with the empathy of realizing that Well, the best thing that humans can do is realize humanity has been here and it's unique to itself, and there's things that humans can do, and experiencing is one of them, right? Experiences is what we, what we know how to do. We know how to experience what's happening. Like, if you go to a dog, a dog can experience being with another dog at the beach, but it doesn't know that it's experiencing it. It just, it's just there. Right? It doesn't have any self-consciousness. It has simple consciousness. Humans know that they're with other humans and they know they're having a good time or a bad time, right? They know that they're learning something or they're not. So we're experiencing stuff and we know that we're experiencing it. AIs can replicate, they can predict, they can do things that humans will never be able to do, and they're going to do them better, faster, and cheaper. But they still can't experience what it's like to be a human because they're not a human. And so even though they become more intelligent, even though they already are in many ways on the path to being more intelligent inside the next year than all of us, what does that mean? Well, that, that means that essentially, um, there's going to be things that we no longer do. But that doesn't mean that we won't have anything to do. It, it, many will be able to invent more things to do than we have time in the day to do them, as I might say.

What do you think is being Like, a genetic AI right now is, is the most useful case of it.

The most useful case versus the most secure case might be two different things, but, you know, the most useful case is, um, you know, you've got people, well, on the, you know, on the kind of simple end where everything starts, you've got people earning money at levels like, I mean, there's kids that have invented prediction market bots. I'm not endorsing this, by the way. Um, you know, they've gone into prediction market bots and they've given their agentic AI $10 and said, if you lose it, you die. And the, the agentic AI has come back with a quarter million dollars worth of profit in the next 48 hours and growing because there are cybernetic mechanisms, right? If you tell it, I'm going to cease to let you exist if you lose $10, it doesn't have any other instructions.

So it will actually— something you would say into AI?

No, people have done this. I mean, this is— there's, there's dozens of cases of people who are, who are making money with prediction market bots just arbitraging price action.

And like, stop— like, like buying stock, you're saying?

Yeah, buying stock, buying prediction markets. You know, like the— like if you go to Coinbase now and, and you want to bet on who's going to win the Super Bowl and whatever, it's a prediction market and it says, hey, the, you know, 67% of the people say that, you know, whatever, and you can put $5 down on your vote. And, and then whatever, like they're arbitraging that kind of stuff. Everything's been gamified. So, so that's like the, like, not, not the highest and best use, but that is something that people are doing because they're looking for ways to make money. And here's a way where I can deploy an agent that makes money for me while I sleep, and it also wins. There's a lot of risk in that for obvious reasons. That I— again, I'm not endorsing. I'm gonna give you one example. What are people doing with it? Another thing that people are doing is they're turning it over to their email, to their, to their social media, to their whatever, and they're growing their audience. Like, I saw one person who, uh, took an Instagram from 0 to 31 million views in less than a month, um, with a bot. And so if you think about it, like— and now there's all kinds of other issues that have popped up, and people are patching them in real time. So it's kind of like this interesting moment of mass experimentation, risk. I mean, one of the things that, you know, is, is scary is that, um, there was a, there was a, uh, open source maintainer. So if you guys know what an open source maintainer is or not, think of it as like when something like Linux or something that is open source software that's not owned by Microsoft or Apple or one of the— right, when that happens, then there's basically maintainers that either work for the foundation or that volunteer that that kind of check in the code and keep the repository of that code secure, safe, updated, working, so that the people that have integrated that into their infrastructure can have the latest, greatest version of it. And so there's a thing called commits. And so what happens with commits is like developers from around the world, because it's open source, send in code patches or ideas. Hey, I think this would improve the code base, right? Well, somebody reviews that and then goes through a process and they, they decide whether it should be added or denied. So if it's denied, it means it never gets put into the codebase. If it's added, then it becomes a feature or a patch to the codebase and everyone that has that codebase now gets it. So these are called commits. Well, one of the things that's bad is that open source is both a blessing, but it's also an attack vector because now you have code-writing agents, like agents that can write code better than humans, faster than humans, 24/7, 365. Where they're rebuilding, you know, things like HubSpot in days or hours and for fractions of the cost, right? And getting rid of SaaS. Those kind of use cases are emerging, but what's happening is that the open source libraries that are being maintained by humans are now getting inundated with what are called PRs. That's basically like someone trying to send in code to get committed to the code base. Well—

And how they make money from that?

It— well, it's not that they make direct money from it, it's that they, they shape, you know, so you can inject bad code, you can inject, you know, malware, you can do all kinds of things that are—

yeah, I'm like, what's in it for them?

Yeah, well, so what's happening is because of the ability to massively push out code now, you have a human-level maintainer being inundated with 10,000 times the volume of code to review and maintain. Well, no human can do And so what happened was one of the well-known maintainers, I believe it was at Linux Foundation, I can't remember the name, but the story's out there, who's been doing it for years, saw that this piece of code came in from an agent, from a bot basically, and reviewed it, but then didn't commit it, denied it, like rejected it. Well, the bot without any human oversight decided to do a hit piece on that maintainer. So basically took offense and started to troll them, did research on them, doxxed them, created Reddit threads against them, and basically threw them under the bus. And so then the community was like, hey, okay, well, like, that, that's not okay. But it was mimicking kind of bad behavior that humans do, right, where we get denied and then we take it out on the guy. So I say all this not to freak anybody out. I say all this to say there's for every negative side of it that's a concern, there's also massive opportunity. And the point is, if you knew that a penny doubled every 30 days was going to be worth $5.3 million at day 30 and someone was offering the chance to figure out where and how to get a penny, would you look? I'm not saying you'd go get 20 of them or 30 of them or 40 of them. I'm saying, would you look? The answer is yes. Then you need to start to understand Open Claw, frontier models, AI. You can't just go use it as the next greatest search engine. You have to start to, as a business owner, because the biggest opportunity that we have right now is to put our fingerprints in wet cement as leaders. Because the cement's been poured on the next 12 months. It's been poured. And it'll come, it'll dry, whether you know about it or not. And if you don't like how it's been poured, okay, but it's been poured, so it's not going back in the bag. And if you want to put your impression on it, if you want to put your ethics in it, if you want to put your, you know, if you want to monetize it, if you want to do any of all those things, then my call to action for you whenever you're hearing this is start today. Start to get beyond curious and serious about how to work with Agentic AI.

Get beyond curious and get serious.

Yeah.

Did you come up with that saying?

I don't know. Probably, maybe. I don't know. I think we used it years ago when we were talking about Bitcoin in the early days. Like, you can go from curious to serious. We'll meet you wherever you are. I think I came up with it then. I don't know. It's always had a nice little ring.

I'll be taking my Schwab account, my retirement, and have AI say, make this a better investment, and then we'll do that.

Well, so people— so there's, again, there's all kinds of ways to get started. I've written about this at length. Other people have done done some recordings with people, and there's different philosophies, right? Like, it— at the end of the day, you know, I'll give you my bias, and then I'll tell you that it's just mine and you should form your own. So my bias is I don't want to lease back my intelligence from a big tech company. I'm done with that. I don't want to do that. And so my choice is, yes, I have subscriptions for $20 a month to Claude and OpenAI and Perplexity and, um, Gemini and like all the big four. And I pay those currently as of this recording. I pay those. I am getting ready to cancel probably all but one of them because I'm not going to feed them any more of my ideas. I am standing up, you know, a virtual private server. You don't need to do it with a Mac Mini. That's one way that you'll hear a lot of people have done it, um, separate hardware, and they put you know, one of the open source models on it or multiple, and then they build their thing there. So essentially you can have the hardware cost one time and whatever it costs you to plug it in, and then no more token costs.

So is that, is that that $500 little box?

Yeah, the little, the little— they're, they're a little bit more now. They're like $600 if you get them decked out the way you need to run the models. But they're—

they call them developers that I know, they're like, you should be switching all your computers to that because it's, it's Yeah, amazing. Is it that fast and great?

It's, it's just the— well, so in layman's terms, what Mac Minis have that other ones don't right now is they have what's called unified memory. So you can daisy chain multiple ones together to get more RAM that is used all at— because that's what the Jeep— that's what the models need, right? So the bigger the model, the more RAM.

AWS daisy chain thing, right, where it splits the CPU and Well, yeah, but this is like on your local hardware.

So yeah, basically putting it on your desk. And when you're doing it with like a $6 a month, you know, virtual private server or something like that, that's either bare metal or that you're, you know, that's in the cloud that you're renting from some data center, that, that's another way to do it. The reason why you want to do that is, you, you know, there's— you do not want to put OpenClaw on your personal device. You don't want to put it on the thing that you have your Apple ID with, your main Gmail with, because people have basically been drained, right? Like, you know, they've, they've commingled it. And think about it this way. If you were to hire an intern today and they were Einstein intelligent times 20, but they were still an intern and you didn't know them from Adam, right? Would you give them your Social Security number, your bank account, your private keys? No, you wouldn't give them the keys to your house. They're an intern. So even though they're infinitely intelligent, they're still an intern. You don't trust them, and you never should, right? Because they're not your family. Um, so what you don't want to do is you don't want to set up some of these things like some people did early on rushing in. You don't want to set these things up with the same Apple ID that you have all your other stuff on, because like it'll go in there and it'll just, it'll, it'll just do what it wants with it. So the way that people You harden that off as you do it, just like you would provision a new employee. You give them their own piece of hardware or their own instance. You give them their own email address. You give them their own phone number, all of which you issue and control. And that's it. And then you decide where that can communicate. So these architectures are what I work with people on. These architectures are what leaders have to start to understand for themselves. But I mean, literally, we're going to live in a world where, you know, we've already had our first 88-day or less unicorn, you know, Open Call. We don't know what the terms of the deal were, but from 0 to 88 days, it got Aqua hired. And we've— we think the terms were somewhere between $5 to $10 billion.

What company?

Open Call. The guy who invented OpenAI.

But who bought it?

OpenAI.

OpenAI. Okay, well, I, I want to cut this short, but we're running out of time, and I want you to— I want you to put your Tell people how to get a hold of you.

Yeah, the best, the best place to kind of follow and learn while we get to know each other is wealthmatterstome.com. That's, that's the, that's the Substack. It's free to subscribe. There's obviously, if you want to support the channel, you can, but it's free to subscribe. The podcast drops there exclusively first every time a new episode comes out. I write a ton of different blogs. We have a section called Shields and Succession. It's all about how to protect your assets. While you build. That's kind of the niche I'm focused on regardless of how big your assets are. If you have a kid who's in a basement or a dorm room, you need to ask them if they're using Open Claw because it's an attack vector as much as it's an opportunity and you need to help them set it up right with a proper entity structure and things like that. So, so those are some of the areas where we're serving the market is just helping people structure for success so that they can kind of innovate and get serious in whatever speed they want. And, but yeah, that's where you go. WealthMattersToMe.com or ChrisJSnook.com. But WealthMattersToMe.com is where you'll get the majority of the content and stuff.

Well, thanks for your time, Chris. Thanks for having me. We'll, we'll be catching up with you soon.

Awesome. Thanks.