THE ATOMIQ LEVEL

Host: Chris J Snook
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The show that rehumanizes wealth management for clients and advisors—decoding the matters of wealth one insightful conversation at a time—so you can grow and protect both your net worth and net happiness. For the advisors, investors, and families mastering business growth, estate protection, and alternative assets like Bitcoin and private deals—all while staying sane, compliant, and fulfilled. The mission: NetWorth + Net Happiness rising together as we navigate the next world order. www.wealthmatterstome.com

  1. 4d ago

    The Relativity Trap: Why Markets Feel Broken Until You Understand Where Capital Runs

    Before you listen/read or watch, make sure you subscribe to Brent Johnson and Santiago Capital on Substack here: And subscribe to Brent’s YouTube channel, The Milkshakes Pod, here: TL:DR Key Takeaways Brent’s work sits at the intersection of global macro, monetary history, capital flows, currency markets, gold, Bitcoin, sovereign debt, and the strange gravity of the U.S. dollar. He is best known for the Dollar Milkshake Theory, but this conversation is not just about a theory. It is about the man behind it. It is about the kid from western Nebraska who used to look up at airplanes and wonder where everyone was going, then grew up to build a framework for understanding where the world’s money goes when the system starts to shake. Brent Johnson grew up in a small town in western Nebraska, far from Wall Street, finance, trading desks, and investment accounts. His father was an insurance salesman who worked for himself, which gave Brent an early model of independence, self-reliance, and eating what you kill. He was not drawn to finance because he loved finance. He was drawn to finance because he was already fascinated by the world. As a kid, Brent remembers looking up at planes flying overhead and wondering where the people on them were going. Years later, while flying from San Francisco to New York, he realized the flight path passed directly over the town where he grew up. His early influences included history, storytelling, Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, and the movie Wall Street. Those influences pulled him toward markets, but experience eventually taught him that Wall Street is not a place where the official story is always the truth. One of Brent’s mentors, Simon Baker, taught him how to take the work seriously without taking himself too seriously. That lesson shaped how Brent survived the stress of markets without losing his humor. A pivotal meeting before the Global Financial Crisis changed his career. A young, newly wealthy couple asked Credit Suisse executives simple but devastating questions about mortgage derivatives, real estate, hedging, and counterparty risk. Brent realized the clients understood the danger better than the people who were supposed to be the experts. That meeting pushed Brent to stop repeating the company line and start thinking for himself. He went back to textbooks, blogs, gold forums, Austrian economics, monetary history, and late-night self-study to understand how the monetary system actually worked. The Dollar Milkshake Theory emerged from that long process. Brent came to see global finance as a relative game, where capital does not necessarily flow to the perfect place. It flows to the least bad place. His core insight was that even though the U.S. dollar and U.S. system have serious problems, the rest of the world often has the same problems with fewer structural advantages. Because global debt, trade, funding, and settlement still depend heavily on dollars, stress can increase demand for dollars rather than reduce it. The “milkshake” analogy came from There Will Be Blood: the U.S. has the biggest straw in the global system and can suck liquidity back into its own markets when the world prints money. Brent originally expected the framework to lead to a sovereign debt and currency crisis by 2024. He openly says that his specific timing call was wrong. But he argues that many other implications of the framework have played out: higher interest rates, falling bond prices, higher gold prices, U.S. equity resilience, and continued dollar importance. The framework has helped him remain invested rather than frozen in permanent crash fear. His approach is not to sit out markets waiting for collapse, but to own diversified assets while maintaining downside protection. Brent’s portfolio worldview includes equities, real estate, gold, cash, and risk management. He sees gold not mainly as a de-dollarization trade, but as a response by countries and investors fleeing weakness in their own currencies. A major theme is that de-dollarization is much harder than most people assume. The dollar’s network effects are embedded across trade, funding, liabilities, offshore demand, and global balance sheets. Brent is preparing a major research paper called The Band, focused on why the dollar is so difficult to replace and why the global economy needs the dollar index to remain inside a functional range. The deeper message: you do not need to agree with every timing call Brent has made to benefit from the framework. The value is learning how to see global markets through flows, relativity, incentives, balance sheets, liquidity, and the hidden plumbing beneath the headlines. This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Brent Johnson is not just a macro interview. It is a story about a man who grew up far from the money centers of the world, became fascinated by where people were going, entered Wall Street through curiosity rather than pedigree, and eventually built one of the most debated monetary frameworks of the last decade. It is about a kid in western Nebraska looking up at planes. It is about a young advisor in New York walking across the city with an $18 million stock certificate in his briefcase and feeling, for one moment, like he owned the world. It is about the intoxicating draw of Wall Street, the danger of repeating the company line, and the moment when a client’s simple question exposes that the so-called experts may not understand the machine they are standing inside. It is about the long, lonely work of thinking for yourself. It is about why the dollar is not strong because America is perfect. It is about why capital often runs toward the least broken system when the rest of the world begins to crack. It is about gold, Bitcoin, U.S. equities, real estate, liquidity, protection, risk, humility, and what it means to manage money when your framework is useful but your timing is never guaranteed. Most of all, this conversation is about the difference between certainty and confidence. Brent is not saying he has everything perfectly figured out. In fact, one of the most important parts of the conversation is his willingness to say where he got something wrong. But he has spent nearly two decades thinking about the dollar, the monetary system, global flows, and crisis dynamics for hours a day. That kind of work does not produce certainty. It produces earned conviction. Press play on this conversation with Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital if you want to understand why the dollar still matters, why de-dollarization is harder than the headlines suggest, why gold can rise without the dollar dying, and why a good macro framework should help you stay invested without pretending risk has disappeared. Because the world’s money is always going somewhere. The question is whether you understand where it runs when fear takes over. Τhe Human Story Behind the Dollar Milkshake Theory Before Brent Johnson became one of the most recognizable voices in global macro, before the Dollar Milkshake Theory became a phrase people argued about across podcasts, Substack threads, YouTube comments, and finance Twitter, before he became a person investors either loved, hated, misunderstood, or quietly stole from, he was a kid in western Nebraska looking up at airplanes. That is where the story begins. Not on Wall Street. Not in a trading pit. Not with a Bloomberg terminal. In a small rural town where people worked on ranches, farms, the railroad, or in local businesses. His father sold insurance across western Nebraska and eastern Colorado. He worked for himself. He drove long distances. He carried the old independent salesman’s lesson that nobody owes you anything, and whatever you eat is usually connected to what you kill. Brent absorbed that. But he also wanted to see the world beyond the town. He was not running from home. In fact, he speaks warmly about where he grew up. He did not hate the small town. He simply sensed that there was more out there. He would read the local newspaper hungry for information about places beyond western Nebraska. He loved history because history was story, and stories were how his mind held the world together. Then there were the planes. He remembers standing outside, looking up at them, and wondering where the people were going. Years later, living in San Francisco and flying to New York for work, he realized that the route passed directly over that same little town. From the window of the plane, he could look down and see where he had once stood. He wondered if another kid was looking up. That image is the emotional key to this episode. The man who built a theory about where global capital flows began as a boy, wondering where people were going. Finance Was the Vehicle, Not the Destination Brent makes an important distinction early in the conversation. He did not become interested in the world because he was interested in finance. He became interested in finance because he was already interested in the world. That difference matters. Some people enter markets because they love the scoreboard. Brent entered because finance became a way to study politics, history, trade, incentives, capital movement, human behavior, fear, ambition, and the power structures underneath everything else. He could do the math. He could calculate ratios. He could understand accounting. But he was never merely a decimal-point person. He was a big-picture thinker, a pattern reader, a storyteller trying to understand why the system moved the way it did. That is part of what makes his work compelling. It is not sterile macro. It is narrative macro. It asks: What is the story underneath the flows? The Bad Influences That Told the Truth Like many people who found their way into Wall Street in that era, Brent was shaped by some influences that were never meant to be instructional manuals. He read Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. He watched Wall Street. He absorbed the mythology of Gordon Gekk

    1h 29m
  2. The Fund Manager Who Saw Silicon Valley Before It Had a Name

    6d ago

    The Fund Manager Who Saw Silicon Valley Before It Had a Name

    Connect with Eric Munson and Adit Ventures Before you watch/listen or read, connect with Eric Munson and learn more about Adit Ventures here:www.aditventures.com Overview Eric Munson’s career sits inside one of the most consequential arcs in modern finance and technology: from the fruit orchards of early Silicon Valley to Fairchild Semiconductor, from Genentech and Apple IPO history to Palantir, Spotify, SpaceX, defense technology, AI, big data, cyber, fintech, healthcare, and the private markets shaping the next generation of wealth creation. His story is not just about venture capital. It is about pattern recognition. It is about what happens when someone grows up close enough to innovation to understand that every great technology wave looks obvious only in hindsight. TL;DR Key Takeaways Eric Munson began life in Brooklyn before his family moved to Silicon Valley in 1971 when his father went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the foundational companies in both semiconductor history and venture-backed company formation. Fairchild became a seedbed for generations of Silicon Valley legends, including people who would later help create Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Intel, and much of the modern venture ecosystem. Eric later worked at Hambrecht & Quist, where he had a front-row seat to the public market emergence of companies like Genentech and Apple, watching Silicon Valley evolve from agricultural orchards into the innovation capital of the world. His personal and professional story also carries deep emotional weight. His family lost loved ones on 9/11 through Cantor Fitzgerald, which later shaped his conviction around Palantir’s mission and the importance of technology that can protect families from a similar tragedy. Adit Ventures was built from modest beginnings. The original 2014 partnerships started small, with roughly a dozen investors and around $1.5 million to $2 million, focused initially on Palantir and Spotify. Over time, Adit deployed approximately $300 million of client capital, alongside about $35 million of its own capital, and returned more than $3 billion in cash and securities to investors. Eric’s investment philosophy has remained consistent for decades: back the best entrepreneurs and managers building tools, solutions, and technologies that change how people live. Adit’s long-term secular themes include AI, big data, cloud, cybersecurity, defense technology, educational technology, financial technology, healthcare, space, and other transformational categories. Eric argues that AI may become the largest innovation wave he has seen because it transcends and compounds prior waves, including chips, PCs, mobile, software, cloud, and the internet. He does not believe AI will lift every boat. Like the early internet, the first visible winners may not be the lasting winners. The most durable value may come from application-layer companies that use AI to solve specific problems in government, healthcare, defense, enterprise operations, education, and other verticals. Eric emphasizes that venture remains a people business. Quantitative metrics matter, but qualitative judgment may matter even more. His 10-step evaluation process includes five quantitative factors, such as growth potential, margin profile, scalability, competitive threats, and business economics, and five qualitative factors, including whether the company serves its customers, employees, shareholders, and the broader community. Leadership matters. Eric repeatedly returns to character, courage, ethics, integrity, resilience, and the ability of founders to navigate difficult cycles. He sees long-term investing as the only real way to capture the value of generational companies. Speculation and day trading are not how he built wealth. He believes the private markets may continue offering mispriced opportunities, especially when fear, uncertainty, liquidity needs, secondary share availability, and timing create discounts in companies tied to long-term secular themes. His optimism is grounded, not naive. He worries about the loss of humanity, individual rights, and ethical guardrails, but he remains deeply bullish on the human spirit, adaptation, technology, healthcare innovation, education, and the democratization of opportunity. The deeper message: wealth creation in the next era will not come from chasing every hype cycle. It will come from finding the people and companies that turn enduring technology waves into lasting human value. Why You Should Listen This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Eric Munson is not just a venture capital interview. It is a living bridge between the origin story of Silicon Valley and the next wave of AI-driven wealth creation. It is about a man whose father worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, who grew up watching fruit orchards turn into the most important innovation ecosystem in modern history, who learned the craft of capital markets around firms like Hambrecht & Quist, and who later built Adit Ventures by finding private market access to companies like Palantir, Spotify, SpaceX, Airbnb, Lyft, Robinhood, Anduril, and other category-defining technology businesses. It is also a story shaped by loss. Eric’s connection to Palantir is not merely financial. After losing family members on 9/11, he understood the human value of software that could help prevent future families from experiencing that kind of devastation. That context gives his investing worldview a seriousness that goes beyond returns. Yes, this episode gets into venture performance, private market secondaries, AI, cyber, defense tech, founder evaluation, valuation discipline, and long-term secular themes. But beneath the numbers is a deeper question: How do you identify the companies that actually matter before the world agrees they matter? Eric’s answer is not hype. It is not momentum chasing. It is not pretending that every AI company deserves a premium. It is a long-term discipline built around founders, markets, timing, character, technology waves, customer need, and the courage to own what the crowd doubts. This conversation is for investors, founders, advisors, family offices, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to understand how private market access, AI disruption, secondary liquidity, and generational technology cycles may shape the next decade of wealth. Because the next great companies are already being built. The question is whether you know how to recognize them before they become obvious. The Pattern Recognition Behind Generational Technology Investing Before Eric Munson became the founder behind Adit Ventures, before he helped deploy hundreds of millions of dollars into private technology companies, before Palantir, Spotify, SpaceX, Airbnb, Robinhood, defense tech, AI, and big data became part of his investing vocabulary, he was a kid from Brooklyn whose life changed when his family moved west. It was 1971. His father had taken a job at Fairchild Semiconductor. At the time, Silicon Valley was not yet the polished myth that founders, allocators, and technology tourists now talk about with near-religious reverence. It was still agricultural land, fruit orchards, engineering talent, semiconductor ambition, military and government demand, and a cluster of people who did not yet know they were building the future. Eric saw that transformation early. He watched a place become a pattern. And that may be the most important part of his story. Most investors learn about innovation from charts, pitch decks, cap tables, and performance attribution. Eric learned it by proximity. His father’s world at Fairchild included people who would later help define venture capital, semiconductors, software, and the modern technology economy. The financial team included figures tied to the origins of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. The scientific and engineering ecosystem around Fairchild helped seed Intel and generations of future builders. This was not just a company. It was a root system. From that root system came entire forests of innovation. From Orchards to IPOs Eric later entered the business himself through Hambrecht & Quist, one of the iconic investment banking firms that helped bring emerging technology and life sciences companies into the public markets. He had a front-row seat to the kind of companies that changed what investors believed was possible. Genentech was one of them. At the time, biotechnology was not yet the accepted industry it is today. Regulators and investors had real skepticism. The idea that genetic engineering could become a scalable commercial and medical force required proof, education, patience, and courage. Eric watched as Genentech helped change the life sciences industry and eventually contributed to a world where biotechnology would reshape disease management, drug development, and quality of life. Then came Apple. One year after the Genentech deal, H&Q helped take Apple Computer public. Again, this was not merely a transaction. It was a window into a wave. Eric was watching new industries move from improbable to inevitable. That matters because great technology investing requires the ability to live in the gap between those two states. When everyone knows the thing is inevitable, most of the easy return is already gone. The opportunity is in the uncomfortable middle, when the future is visible but not yet agreed upon. Eric has spent much of his career in that middle. The Weight Behind the Palantir Conviction There is another part of Eric’s story that cannot be separated from the way he thinks about technology. His family lost loved ones on 9/11 through Cantor Fitzgerald. That tragedy sits quietly but powerfully behind his conviction in Palantir. For Eric, Palantir was never just an interesting data company with government contracts. It represented something more human: software that could help agencies identify threats, analyze complex data, and potentially prevent other families from experiencing the ki

    1h 5m

  3. May 29

    The Woman Who Sees the New World Order Forming Before the Headlines Do

    Before you read the show notes below, subscribe to Tanvi Ratna on Substack: Tanvi’s work is some of the sharpest geopolitical and macro-strategy analysis I have found on Substack because she does something most headline commentary fails to do. She watches what is actually moving beneath the noise. Not the talking points. Not the performative outrage. Not the easy partisan explanation. The deals. The incentives. The energy flows. The security architecture. The trade routes. The industrial policy. The quiet reordering of power before most people realize the world has already changed. TL;DR Key Takeaways Tanvi Ratna returns to the ATOMIQ LEVEL after her first appearance became one of the strongest-performing episodes of the show’s early run. This conversation is a deeper field report from someone who has spent the last several weeks close to the front lines of the global realignment, including time in Europe, Eastern Europe, and around major diplomatic and economic meetings. Her central argument is that the world is not merely experiencing chaos. It is experiencing a deliberate departure from the old liberal international order toward a more transactional, sovereignty-driven, mercantilist world. A major theme is that many of the biggest deals and reordering moves are happening quietly. The most important parts of the strategy are often not the things being loudly broadcast. Europe is being reshaped militarily, economically, and energetically. NATO responsibilities are shifting. Eastern Europe is being elevated. Poland, Croatia, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, Italy, and the UK appear in the conversation as part of a different strategic map than the old Franco-German-centered Europe. Energy is the foundation of the whole shift. As Europe moves away from Russian energy, American LNG, Eastern European ports, new pipelines, and energy infrastructure become strategic levers for the next phase of European security and reconstruction. Croatia and Poland emerge as especially important nodes. Croatia is discussed as a growing energy and infrastructure base, while Poland is framed as a continental headquarters of sorts for the new strategic push. AI data centers, energy infrastructure, technical talent, and geopolitical alignment are all converging. Tanvi describes Eastern Europe as not only strategically important, but also technically capable and cost-competitive. The U.S. is not simply retreating from Europe. It is forcing Europe to take more responsibility while preserving key strategic capabilities such as nuclear umbrella support and broader coordination power. The conversation then moves to China, the Quad, India, Japan, Australia, and the Indo-Pacific. Tanvi argues that public optics around China may suggest cordiality, but the post-summit moves suggest containment architecture is still being activated. The Quad is framed as a renewed strategic platform, with maritime intelligence, critical minerals, supply chain cooperation, standards, telecom, digital identity, AI, and freedom of navigation all part of the emerging architecture. Critical minerals become a major investment and industrial policy theme. Tanvi warns that building non-China supply chains will require more than rhetoric. It may require price floors, guaranteed demand, and coordinated industrial policy because China can undercut new entrants. The deeper message is that we are moving from a world optimized for comparative advantage to a world optimized for sovereignty. That changes everything. Trade. Energy. Defense. AI. Critical minerals. Data centers. Supply chains. Capital allocation. Regional alliances. Investor opportunity. National strategy. The most important line of the conversation may be Tanvi’s warning that when the economic and security layers begin moving together, the world order can change in just a few years, whether people are ready for it or not. Why You Should Listen This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Tanvi Ratna is not just a geopolitical interview. It is a field report from inside the quiet machinery of a world being reordered in real time. It is about what happens when the old post-war assumptions stop working, when free trade is no longer treated as an unquestioned good, when countries begin optimizing for sovereignty as much as efficiency, and when the United States starts asking allies to carry more of the burden for their own security, energy, infrastructure, and industrial future. It is about why Europe’s center of gravity may be moving east. It is about why energy is not just a commodity. It is about why AI is not just a technology story. It is about why critical minerals are not just an investment theme. It is about why China cannot be understood only through tariffs, trade deficits, Taiwan headlines, or summit optics. It is about the return of grand strategy in a world that many people are still trying to explain through yesterday’s vocabulary. Tanvi’s gift is that she does not let the conversation stay at the surface. She follows the incentives underneath the official statements. She watches what happens after the meetings, not just what gets announced during them. She understands that the real story may be hiding in which port gets funded, which command changes hands, which country becomes a new hub, which supply chain gets guaranteed, which ally gets elevated, and which energy route becomes unavoidable. Most of all, this conversation is about seeing the shape of the next world before it is obvious. Because by the time a new order becomes obvious, the best decisions have already been made by the people who saw it forming early. Press play on this conversation with Tanvi Ratna if you want to understand why the next three years may reshape the global map of power, energy, AI infrastructure, critical minerals, and capital allocation. Because the world is not waiting for the headlines to catch up. Recognizing the Quiet Reordering of the World Tanvi Ratna, Grand Strategy, and the Return of Sovereignty as the New Economic Stack When Tanvi Ratna returned to the ATOMIQ LEVEL for Episode 37, it did not feel like a routine follow-up interview. It felt like a dispatch. Her first conversation on the show had already struck a nerve. It became one of the strongest-performing episodes of the early ATOMIQ LEVEL run, not because the subject matter was easy, but because Tanvi gave listeners something rare in a noisy world: a framework that made the chaos legible. This second conversation begins with a different kind of energy. Tanvi has been moving. Europe. Eastern Europe. China-related summits. Quad meetings. Conversations with officials. Interviews. Closed-door rooms. The kind of travel and proximity that changes analysis from theory into pattern recognition. She is not sitting back and commenting on headlines. She is watching the machinery move. And the machinery, in her telling, is moving much faster than most people realize. The Deals Nobody Is Talking About Tanvi begins with a striking observation. Some of the most important moves being made by the administration are not the ones being loudly promoted. In an era where nearly everything is broadcast, branded, leaked, clipped, and weaponized for attention, that fact alone matters. The big things are happening quietly. That is the first lens for the conversation. The loud story is Iran, China, tariffs, summits, personality conflict, and the surface-level drama of global politics. The quieter story is the actual reordering of the energy, defense, infrastructure, and industrial map. Tanvi says she has seen this repeatedly over the last year of tracking the administration. Major deals are being made. Strategic architecture is shifting. But not everything is being announced in a way that fits the 24-hour news cycle. That may be because the real objective is not applause. It is leverage. And leverage often works best before everyone knows exactly where it has been applied. Europe Is Being Rewired The conversation turns first to Europe, where Tanvi sees three layers of reordering: defense, energy, and economic infrastructure. The defense layer begins with NATO. For years, American presidents have complained that Europe relies too heavily on the United States for security. This is not new. What Tanvi argues is new is that the rhetoric is now becoming operational. Europe is being told, in effect, that it must take more responsibility for itself. The United States may remain the ultimate coordinator in key areas. It may retain the nuclear umbrella. It may still provide heavy-lift capabilities and strategic support. But the days of the old blanket assumption are changing. Tanvi points to quiet shifts in NATO command structures and the elevation of countries outside the traditional Western European core. This is not simply about France and Germany anymore. Poland matters. Italy matters. Finland and Sweden matter. The Arctic matters. The Mediterranean matters. Eastern Europe matters. The map is changing. And if the map is changing, the investment thesis changes with it. The End of the Old Europe Frame For decades, many Americans thought of Europe through a Western European lens: Germany, France, maybe the UK, maybe Brussels, maybe the Eurozone as a political abstraction. Tanvi argues that this mental model is becoming obsolete. The new strategic map is less sentimental. It is about who is aligned, who is growing, who is willing, who is exposed, who is close to the front line, who has technical talent, who can host infrastructure, who can move quickly, and who can help build the next security and economic stack. Eastern Europe becomes central in this frame. Poland is not a peripheral player. Croatia is not a scenic backdrop. Romania and Slovakia are not footnotes. Finland and Sweden are not merely new NATO members. These countries become part of the emerging architecture. Tanvi describes the enthusiasm she saw among Eastern European leaders not as cautious consensus-building, but

    1h 22m

  4. May 27

    The Playbook For Turning Unplanned Disruption Into Your Playground

    Get Joel’s Resources: Before you read or listen to the show * Subscribe to Joel on Substack * Get Joel’s new book, AI Made Simple: Artificial Intelligence for Everyday Life, here: * Download his 100% free (no opt-in) deep dive report on the five-part Disruption Confidence Cycle here: Now push play while you read the rest or just enjoy! Joel’s work has always lived at the intersection of curiosity, creativity, faith, technology, play, reinvention, and making complicated things feel simple enough for normal humans to actually use. That is why this conversation matters now. Because AI is not just another tool. It is the latest disruption in a career built by a man who has survived, studied, and reinvented himself through the web, online gaming, Google AdSense, social media, podcasting, crypto, NFTs, and now artificial intelligence. TL;DR Key Takeaways Joel Comm describes himself as independent, strong-willed, curious, playful, and deeply shaped by a spiritual awakening in his mid-twenties that gave him a moral foundation for the rest of his life. His entrepreneurial path began in the early 1990s as a mobile DJ, radio voice, nightclub DJ, and technology enthusiast. He bought his first computer, a TRS-80 Model 1, in 1980 at age sixteen and was already dialing into bulletin board systems decades before most people understood the internet. Joel built his first website in 1995 and eventually created ClassicGames.com, a multiplayer JavaScript game room that grew to thousands of players and was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He has written 16 books, with his 17th, AI Made Simple, coming out in December. His work has been read around the world, and he has spoken globally by making complex technology accessible, practical, and fun. Joel’s career has been shaped by repeated disruptions: the web, online gaming, Google AdSense, social media, mobile, live video, blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and AI. He co-created The Bad Crypto Podcast with Travis Wright in 2017 after a season of uncertainty and serendipity. The show became one of the longest-running crypto podcasts in the world, with more than 10 million downloads. Joel’s operating philosophy comes from his book The Fun Formula: be curious, take risks, and trust the process. In this episode, Joel introduces his Disruption Confidence Cycle, a five-stage framework for navigating technological change: disruption, doubt, clarity, confidence, and momentum. You can download his free deep dive report on that framework here: Wealth Matters 3.0 is a reader-supported publication. To unlock all access or never miss a post, become a free or paid subscriber today. Joel openly shares that even after decades of reinvention, he has had seasons where he wondered whether his best work was behind him. The AI wave created that same doubt again. At first, Joel used AI but did not feel fully claimed by it. Then, in early 2026, he began building with AI tools like Claude, OpenClaw, and Claude Code, and everything changed. By asking AI to guide him “like a fifth grader,” Joel set up tools, built websites, created games, launched experimental projects, and became a practitioner rather than just a commentator. That practitioner shift became the source of his new clarity, confidence, and momentum. Joel now hosts AI for Everyone, a show designed especially for people around age 55 and older who feel intimidated, confused, skeptical, or frightened by AI. His message is not that everyone needs to become technical. It is that everyone needs enough reps to see what AI can help them create, understand, simplify, or improve. The deeper message: Joel Comm’s story is not about chasing every shiny object. It is about staying curious enough to find your next chapter before the world writes you out of it. Why You Should Listen This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Joel Comm is not just an AI interview. It is a story about a man who has spent more than four decades riding the edge of technological change, not because he had a perfect plan, but because he refused to stop being curious. It is about a kid who bought a TRS-80 in 1980, became a mobile DJ, built websites before most people knew what a website was, sold an online game platform to Yahoo, wrote books that taught the world how to monetize the early web, helped millions of people understand crypto through The Bad Crypto Podcast, rode the NFT wave, lived through the winters, and then found himself asking the question every creative leader eventually asks: Is my best work behind me? It is about why the answer was no. It is about how AI reawakened Joel’s builder instinct once he stopped merely watching the tools and started using them to make things. Websites. Games. Calculators. Speaker platforms. Educational tools. Experiments. Proof that the cost of trying has collapsed. It is about why older leaders, founders, creators, business owners, advisors, and professionals may have more advantage in the AI era than they realize, because pattern recognition only comes from living through prior disruptions. It is also about why AI does not have to feel cold, technical, alien, or overwhelming. Joel’s mission with AI Made Simple and AI for Everyone is to make artificial intelligence simple, easy, useful, and fun for everyday life, especially for people who feel like the whole conversation has already passed them by. Most of all, this conversation is about creative renewal. The kind that arrives after doubt. The kind that only shows up when you are willing to play again. The kind that reminds you that your experience is not obsolete just because the tools have changed. Press play on this conversation with Joel Comm if you want to understand how a lifelong digital pioneer navigates reinvention, why AI may be the greatest creative empowerment tool of our lifetime, and how to move from disruption to doubt, from doubt to clarity, from clarity to confidence, and from confidence to momentum. Because the future does not belong only to the youngest coder in the room. It belongs to the people who keep putting in the reps. The Man Who Turned Disruption Into a Playground Before Joel Comm became a bestselling author, global speaker, digital pioneer, crypto podcaster, AI educator, and one of the more enduring explainers of emerging technology on the internet, he was a young man with no clear map. He came from a broken home. He made his way through college without much direction, swept along by culture, partying, confusion, and the drift that can define a young life before it finds its center. Then, in his mid-twenties, something shifted. Joel found spirituality in the person of Jesus Christ, and that encounter gave him what he describes as a moral ground to stand on. It did not fix everything. He is honest about that. He does not pretend faith turned him into a flawless person. He says he is still very good at screwing things up. But it gave him a foundation. A place to build from. A line underneath the chaos that allowed the rest of his life to begin taking shape. That matters because Joel’s story is not merely about technology. It is about orientation. The tools changed. The platforms changed. The markets changed. The industries changed. But the man stayed anchored by a few repeatable instincts: curiosity, play, risk, faith, humor, and a willingness to try the next thing before the crowd understood why it mattered. The Voice Before the Website Joel’s first entrepreneurial gig was not a startup, at least not in the way people use the word now. It was as a mobile DJ. That detail feels almost too perfect. Before he was explaining the internet, before he was writing books, before he was podcasting to millions, before he was teaching people about crypto or AI, he was already learning how to hold attention, read a room, move energy, and use his voice. He did radio. He did nightclubs. Eventually, he realized he could make more money with his own gear doing private parties, and he performed hundreds of them. That was one side of Joel. The other side was the kid who bought his first computer in 1980 at age sixteen, a TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K of RAM and a cassette player for storage. To save a program, you typed the command and recorded it onto magnetic tape. To load it, you played it back. It sounds primitive now. At the time, it was magic. Joel was dialing into bulletin board systems in 1980, which means he has been in the online world for more than four decades. Long before most people thought of digital life as normal, he was already there, experimenting, wandering, tinkering, asking what this machine could do. That is the beginning of the pattern. Joel rarely waits for the world to explain the toy. He picks it up and starts playing. The First Website and the Yahoo Exit In 1995, Joel built his first website. He sensed that the internet was the next big thing, not because he had a crystal ball, but because he had enough curiosity to feel the shift before it had fully become obvious. By 1997, he had a family-friendly website with software reviews and web games. He has always loved games, and that love would become one of the earliest meaningful inflection points in his career. His webmaster introduced him to a young graduate at UC San Diego who had created the foundation of what might have been one of the world’s first JavaScript multiplayer game rooms. Friends were testing games like Hearts, Spades, Chess, and Backgammon. Joel saw the possibility immediately. They partnered. They named it ClassicGames.com. They expanded it to sixteen games and grew it to thousands of players. Then Yahoo bought it in 1998. His partner went to work for Yahoo as what Joel jokingly calls the “chief game Yahoo.” Joel took cash and walked away, something he now describes with the self-deprecating wisdom of hindsight. His partner may not have needed to work another day in his life. Joel took what was, at the time, the most money he had ever seen. Still, that exit changed his life. It

    50 min

  5. May 27

    The Man Who Rewrote the Scorecard for National Wealth

    Gratitude for a great conversation! Before you read the show notes below, * Please subscribe to Roger * And get Roger’s book, The Ledger: How Important Assets Go Astray and a Framework for Sovereign Wealth Roger’s conversation is a masterclass in practical understanding of what truly drives a nation’s (or family’s) wealth. His work is built around one of the most important but under-discussed questions in economics, politics, investing, and national stewardship: What if GDP is only the income statement, and the real story is hiding on the balance sheet? TL;DR Key Takeaways Roger Ohan began his career in engineering, realized he did not like engineering, earned an MBA, and then entered finance through Chemical Bank, now JPMorgan Chase. He was placed into a then-obscure corner of the market called fixed income derivatives and became one of the early traders in interest rate swaps, helping build part of what became JPMorgan’s core fixed income business in Europe. Roger’s worldview was shaped by both extremes of finance: highly liquid, high-volume fixed income markets where billions could move in seconds, and illiquid emerging market equities where assets could trade once a month or once a quarter. After leaving trading in 1997, he helped build an emerging markets asset management business focused heavily on Russian equities during the privatization boom, including exposure to the extraordinary rise and political destruction surrounding Yukos. The seed of The Ledger began with a question that bothered him after Hurricane Katrina in 2005: how could a city be destroyed, families lose homes, businesses, memories, and assets, and yet the economic statistics fail to show the destruction of real wealth? Roger’s core insight is that GDP measures flow, like an income statement, but it does not properly measure the condition of a country’s balance sheet. His Gross National Assets framework looks at five categories of national assets: natural resources, infrastructure, human capital, intellectual capital, and financial assets. Those assets must then be weighed against liabilities, including debt, unfunded promises, deteriorating infrastructure, depleted resources, and future obligations. Over those assets sits what Roger calls the governance multiplier. Good governance compounds national wealth. Bad governance can destroy the same asset base. The contrast between Norway and Nigeria is central to his framework. Both had oil. Norway converted its natural resources into a financial asset through a sovereign wealth fund and strong governance. Nigeria largely failed to convert its oil wealth into a durable national balance sheet strength. Nauru is Roger’s cautionary tale. Once one of the richest countries in the world per capita because of phosphate deposits created by ancient bird guano, it mined its balance sheet, spent the proceeds poorly, and collapsed after the resource declined. Singapore and South Korea are the positive examples. Both began with very little, especially South Korea after the Korean War and Singapore after separation from Malaysia, but built enormous sovereign wealth by investing in human capital, infrastructure, rule of law, and governance. Cuba is one of Roger’s most striking examples of trapped human capital: a country with literacy, doctors, engineers, and education, but a governance structure that forces talent into low-productivity survival behaviors rather than compounding national wealth. The framework introduces the “sovereign share,” the value of a country’s net assets divided by its population. In simple terms, it asks: how much national equity does each citizen effectively inherit? AI complicates the framework because human capital is the largest balance sheet asset in advanced economies. If AI reduces the value of human labor faster than new productive roles emerge, national balance sheets may weaken in ways GDP will not immediately reveal. Roger’s framework applies to families, business owners, and investors, too. Income matters, but the balance sheet matters more. A high-earning person or nation can still become fragile if they consume everything and fail to compound assets. The deeper message: nations, businesses, and families should stop confusing activity with wealth creation. Why You Should Listen This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Roger Ohan is not just a macroeconomics interview. It is the story of a man who spent decades inside the machinery of global finance, watching markets move in real time, watching countries rise and fall on governance choices, watching assets be created, extracted, wasted, or compounded, and finally deciding that the way we measure national prosperity is dangerously incomplete. It is about a trader who began in the obscure world of interest rate swaps before they became central to modern finance, then moved into emerging market asset management, Russian equities, infrastructure advisory, fund administration, private equity restructurings, and board-level investment work. It is about the moment Hurricane Katrina exposed something that GDP could not explain: the destruction of real human, physical, and financial wealth hiding beneath a headline economic metric that could still look superficially fine. It is about why a car crash, a burned house, a ghost city, an unused bridge, a depleted island, and a mismanaged oil field can all increase measured economic activity while making the owner, the city, the country, or the people poorer. It is about why Norway became one of the great sovereign wealth stories in modern history while other oil-rich nations burned through their balance sheets. It is about why Singapore and South Korea prove that human capital, governance, education, rule of law, infrastructure, and patience can turn poor nations into extraordinary compounding machines. It is about why the AI revolution may force us to rethink the value of human capital on national balance sheets, especially if brains, not just hands, are now being augmented or replaced. Most of all, this conversation is about truth in accounting. Not the accounting of a company. The accounting of civilization. Press play on this conversation with Roger Ohan, author of The Ledger, if you want a framework that helps you see through economic gaslighting, political scorekeeping, distorted GDP narratives, and the dangerous habit of confusing spending with wealth creation. Because a nation can look busy and still be getting poorer. A business can have revenue and still be eroding its future. A family can have income and still fail to build a balance sheet. And once you learn to see the ledger, you never look at prosperity the same way again. The Man Who Looked Past GDP and Found the Missing Ledger Gross National Assets and the Balance Sheet of Civilization Before Roger Ohan wrote The Ledger, before he began developing the Gross National Assets framework, before he started asking whether countries were actually getting richer or merely producing activity that looked like growth, he was an engineer who did not want to be an engineer. So he did what many smart people do when the first track does not quite fit. He got an MBA. Then he walked into finance through a bank called Chemical Bank, which would eventually become JPMorgan Chase. He did not begin in some obvious center of glamour. He was placed into a strange and obscure corner of the market that almost did not exist yet: fixed income derivatives. Interest rate swaps. At the time, that was not the sprawling, central, institutional market it would later become. It was still emerging, still being built, still not entirely understood by the broader financial world. Roger was early. He was lucky, as he says, but he was also capable enough to understand what luck had handed him. He became one of the early people trading swaps and helped build part of what became JPMorgan’s core fixed income business in Europe. That is not a small thing. It meant sitting in markets where every second mattered. Government bonds, repos, swaps, massive positions, payroll numbers, GDP releases, interest rates, and billions of dollars of exposure moved across screens in real time. A number would hit, and within seconds, markets would respond. You could win or lose millions before most people even understood what had happened. That kind of early career leaves a permanent mark. It trains a person to respect flows, liquidity, reflexes, leverage, and the brutal honesty of price. It also teaches a lesson most people outside markets never fully internalize: The number everyone is watching may not be the number that matters. The Dumbbell Life of a Market Thinker Roger’s career did not stay on one side of the financial world. After years in highly liquid fixed income markets, he moved into the opposite environment: emerging market equities. That shift gave him what he calls a dumbbell background. On one side, there were some of the most liquid instruments in the world, moving constantly, reacting instantly, and repricing by the second. On the other side, there were deeply illiquid emerging market securities, including Russian equities, where options might trade once a month or once a quarter. One world was all speed. The other was all opacity. Both taught him something. From fixed income, he learned how the global monetary machine moves. From emerging markets, he learned what happens when governance, property rights, incentives, and state power sit underneath the numbers. He saw assets that looked cheap because they were cheap, and assets that looked cheap because the market did not trust the system around them. One of the defining examples was Russia in the late 1990s, during the privatization boom. Roger was investing in Russian equities from roughly 1997 to 2000, a period when assets under management could go from zero to $500 million and then back down to $30 million because that was what Russian equities did. They boomed. They collapsed

    1h 19m

  6. May 21

    How Colorado Is Mapping Human Agency in the Age of AI

    Connect with AI Colorado and Robert Reich Before you read the show notes below, connect with AI Colorado and Robert Reich at https://www.aicolorado.org AI Colorado is being built as a community intelligence layer for one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do humans stay informed, connected, useful, creative, and locally empowered in a world where artificial intelligence is evolving faster than any institution can comfortably absorb? Robert’s work sits at the intersection of startups, community building, human agency, local ecosystems, AI literacy, and the belief that the best way to navigate technological overwhelm is not to isolate, panic, or wait for permission. It is to gather. It is to learn. It is to help each other move. TL;DR Key Takeaways Robert Reich is a serial entrepreneur who moved from New York to Colorado in 2006 after school in Georgia and early time back in New York. He describes himself as an introvert-extrovert who likes solving problems at a machine, then turning those solutions into companies. One of Robert’s personal rituals as an entrepreneur is making skateboards for the companies he starts. Some succeed. Some fail. He keeps the boards intact because they are not just artifacts for the wall. They are meant to be ridden. Robert and Chris first crossed paths in the Colorado startup ecosystem around 2013 to 2015, during a period when the state’s “give first” culture was becoming a defining feature of its entrepreneurial identity. Colorado’s startup ecosystem became a powerful example of how communities of common interest can accelerate people, ideas, companies, and confidence without needing a centralized gatekeeper. Robert helped build and grow the Boulder/Denver New Tech ecosystem, including community maps and events that made it easier for founders, mentors, service providers, and builders to find each other. Chris credits Robert’s ecosystem mapping work with helping him see the opportunity to light up Fort Collins and connect northern Colorado into the broader startup network. A major theme of the conversation is that Colorado’s unique advantage was never just technology. It was culture: people who were willing to show up, ask useful questions, give first, mentor, connect dots, and create access without hoarding status. AI Colorado is Robert’s attempt to bring that same community intelligence into the age of artificial intelligence. The platform begins with a map of the state and an algorithm designed to connect people based on their interests, sectors, counties, topics, and skill levels. AI Colorado is not simply a vendor directory. It is designed to help people understand how they are connected, what they should learn next, who they should meet, what events they should attend, and how they can become more competitive in an AI-shaped economy. The conversation frames AI anxiety as different from prior technology waves because this shift is horizontal. It is not disrupting one industry at a time. It is touching hundreds of workflows, roles, and professions at once. Robert and Chris argue that the most profound difference is that AI is no longer merely helping humans perform work. It is beginning to define, execute, and route work inside the black box without the human always remaining at the top of the stack. The practical advice for listeners is to start small, personal, and concrete. Use paid AI tools if possible. Give them real context. Ask them to summarize, critique, explain, compare, or help with something you already understand well enough to validate. Robert emphasizes that anxiety can become confidence once people experience AI saving them time on something personal and useful. The deeper message: the future may belong less to the person who tries to keep up alone and more to the community that learns how to help its members keep moving together. Why You Should Listen This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Robert Reich is not just an AI interview. It is a reunion between two builders who met inside Colorado’s startup ecosystem at a time when “give first” was more than a slogan and community was still one of the most powerful technologies in the room. It is about a serial entrepreneur who used skateboards as company artifacts, helped build New Tech community gatherings, mapped local startup activity, and then looked at the AI wave and realized something familiar was needed again. A map. A gathering point. A way for people to find each other before the complexity swallowed them. It is about why AI Colorado is not simply another AI website, tool, directory, or newsletter. It is an attempt to turn local community into an adaptive intelligence system, one that can meet beginners, experts, founders, workers, business owners, public leaders, and curious citizens where they are and help them take the next step. It is about anxiety, but not despair. Robert and Chris do not pretend the AI transition is small. They do not pretend governments, corporations, schools, or institutions are prepared to move at the speed of the change. They do not pretend that everyone can calmly plan five years ahead when the tools themselves are changing every week. But they also do not surrender to panic. They return to human agency. They return to local trust. They return to the Colorado lesson: people who show up, contribute, ask better questions, and help each other can move faster than people waiting for top-down permission. Most of all, this conversation is about the human premium in the agentic age. When machines can execute, optimize, respond, and even define work, the next arbitrage may not be speed. It may be trust. It may be community. It may be a human being who knows enough to connect two other human beings at exactly the right time. Press play on this conversation with Robert Reich of AI Colorado if you want to understand why the next chapter of AI literacy may not start in a corporate boardroom or federal policy memo. It may start in a local ecosystem willing to help its people get less afraid and more capable, one useful connection at a time. Because the future is arriving too fast to navigate alone. The Man Mapping Human Agency in the Age of AI Before Robert Reich became the chief instigator and self-described bottle washer behind AI Colorado, before he began building a platform to help people across a state understand, learn, connect, and compete in the age of artificial intelligence, he was already the kind of founder who liked to turn a company into something you could ride. Literally. When Robert starts companies, he often makes skateboards for them. Not decorative skateboards meant only for a wall, but boards that can actually be ridden. Some of the companies work. Some do not. Some become exits. Some become lessons. But the boards stay intact. There is something revealing in that detail. Robert does not treat entrepreneurship as a trophy case. He treats it as motion. A company is something you build, test, ride, fall off of, repair, learn from, and maybe ride again. The blood, when it shows up, is usually not from the company failing. It is from somebody riding the board. That feels like the right place to begin, because this conversation is not really about AI as software. It is about movement. How communities move. How humans move. How people keep moving when the map is changing beneath their feet. Robert was born in New York, went to school in Georgia, returned to New York, and then moved to Colorado in 2006. By his own description, he is a classic serial entrepreneur and an introvert-extrovert, someone who may not naturally work the room at a barbecue, but who loves sitting in front of a machine, solving problems, and turning useful solutions into something larger. That profile matters because Robert’s work has always lived between the machine and the community. He likes to build things. But he also knows that technology without humans around it does not become culture. The Colorado Way Chris and Robert first crossed paths years ago inside the Colorado startup ecosystem, roughly between 2013 and 2015, when Chris had moved from Southern California to Colorado with a young family and no clear plan except the instinct that something different might be waiting there. It was. Colorado had something that is hard to manufacture and easy to underestimate until you experience it. Give first. The phrase has become familiar in startup circles, but in Colorado it was not just a brand line. It was a social operating system. People showed up. People helped. People mentored. People with real money, real exits, real scar tissue, and real responsibilities still spent hours on a Thursday night listening to someone with a napkin-stage idea and asking the kind of questions that could move them forward. Chris had been around startup ecosystems before. Southern California had activity. Puerto Rico had talent and drive. Arizona had activity and grit. San Francisco had density. But Colorado had a specific kind of generosity that felt different. Robert tells a small story that explains it better than any ecosystem report could. When he first moved to Colorado, he went to the Whole Foods on Pearl Street looking for cream cheese. In New York, maybe someone points toward aisle five, if they respond at all. In Boulder, the person did not merely point. They physically walked him there. That was his indoctrination into the culture. Not “go over there.” “Come with me.” That difference became the soul of the ecosystem. From Bagels to New Tech Robert’s entry into Colorado’s startup community began the way many meaningful things begin: with a need to meet people. He was new. He did not know the ecosystem. He was working on something interesting and wanted to find others. So he borrowed inspiration from an event he had seen in New York and helped host an early New Tech gathering in his office. He brought bagels. People came. Not a few people. Dozens. Then more. Between

    1h 25m

  7. May 20

    The Advisor Who Escaped the Cage With His Humanity Intact

    Connect with Shawn Glogowski Before you watch, listen, or read the show article below, connect with Shawn Glogowski, principal and co-founder of Note Advisors. You can learn more about Shawn and the Note Advisors team here: https://www.noteadvisor.com/team/shawn-glogowski-bio/ Shawn represents a new, and in many ways older, version of wealth advice: fiduciary, human, local in values but national in reach, deeply technical but emotionally intelligent, and built around the idea that the future of financial planning will not be won by the advisor with the flashiest portfolio model. It will be won by the advisor who can help another human being act on the advice that actually matters. TL;DR Key Takeaways Shawn Glogowski did not enter college on a clear financial services path. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, went to school there, and says he “fell into” the financial services profession in 2005 through a family friend. He began inside a bank-owned broker-dealer environment with proprietary products, sales pressure, high turnover, and the old-school “smile and dial” culture of call nights, desk phones, and learning how to survive by making human connections. Instead of becoming disillusioned, Shawn found something he loved: being in service to other human beings. That became the thread that carried him through nearly two decades in the profession. Early in his career, he gravitated toward holistic financial planning rather than product sales. He loved understanding the ripple effects of decisions across investments, insurance, taxes, retirement, estate planning, cash flow, and family life. A pivotal moment came during his CFP coursework, when another young advisor named Sean introduced him to the idea of a fee-only RIA. Shawn had never heard of that model before, but the conversation stayed with him. He met his future partner, Tom, in the broker-dealer world. Tom was older and beginning to think about succession, while Shawn was younger and thinking about the kind of firm he wanted to build for the next 30 years. In 2014, Shawn and Tom broke away, dropped securities licenses, eventually moved away from insurance licensing, and built what became Note Advisors as an independent, fee-only, SEC-registered investment advisory firm. The move was not only about compensation. It was about escaping the “cage” of broker-dealer compliance and product constraints so they could serve clients the way they believed clients actually needed to be served. Note Advisors is built around a team model rather than a lone-advisor model. The firm focuses on holistic wealth management, planning, client experience, and the ability to serve clients across multiple dimensions of life. A major differentiator is the firm’s use of a wealth coach, Christine, who helps bridge the gap between technical financial advice and the client’s relationship with money. Shawn believes the future of advice is not fee compression as much as value expansion. Advisors who only charge to manage a portfolio may be vulnerable. Advisors who help clients navigate the human, emotional, behavioral, and multigenerational side of wealth may become more valuable. The firm organizes planning around six pillars: cash flow, insurance, taxes and tax planning, investments, retirement planning, and estate planning, wrapped inside the client’s relationship with money. AI is not something Shawn fears. He sees it as a productivity tool that can make technical people more efficient and give front-facing advisors more time to be proactive, human, and present with clients. Shawn believes the future belongs to advisors and firms that use technology as table stakes while differentiating through human connection, empathy, clarity, proactive communication, and trust. The deeper message: wealth advice is not just about getting the numbers right. It is about helping people actually live the life the numbers say they can afford. Why You Should Listen This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Shawn Glogowski is not just an advisor interview. It is a story about a Buffalo-based fiduciary who came up through the old broker-dealer world, survived the smile-and-dial era, discovered the deeper calling of holistic planning, broke out of the product cage, and built Note Advisors around the belief that the future of wealth advice is profoundly human. It is about a young advisor who entered the business in 2005 without a grand plan, learned to make calls on Monday nights, chased appointments from phone books and referral lists, and slowly realized that what he loved was not selling financial products. He loved helping people. It is about why technical advice is only the beginning. A spreadsheet may say a client can retire at 62, but if that client gets to 62 and cannot emotionally imagine who they are without work, the plan is not complete. The math was right, but the human system was unfinished. It is about why AI may make the best advisors better and expose the ones who were only hiding behind investment management, generic portfolios, and old distribution advantages. It is about why the next generation of advisory firms may need more than quants, model portfolios, and financial planning software. They may need wealth coaches. They may need emotional intelligence. They may need multigenerational teams. They may need the courage to talk about money, identity, fear, marriage, children, work, legacy, and what happens after the client achieves the number they thought would make them free. Most of all, this is a conversation about the difference between delivering advice and helping someone act on it. That difference is everything. Press play on this conversation with Shawn Glogowski of Note Advisors if you want to understand where fiduciary advice is heading, why the human advisor is not going away, and why the future of wealth management may depend less on managing money and more on understanding what money means inside a human life. Because the next era of wealth advice will not be won by the advisor who simply has the best answer. It will be won by the advisor who can help the client become ready to live it. The Advisor Who Escaped the Cage Before Shawn Glogowski became principal and co-founder of Note Advisors, before he helped build an SEC-registered independent advisory firm, before he was speaking fluently about wealth coaching, relationship with money, value expansion, succession, AI, client experience, and the emotional architecture of financial planning, he was a young man in Buffalo who had stumbled into financial services almost by accident. That is how he tells it. He grew up in Western New York. Born and raised in the Buffalo area. Went to school there. Went to college there. He was not on some perfectly charted finance track. There was no cinematic moment where a young Shawn looked at a stock quote and decided, with total clarity, that he would one day become a fiduciary wealth advisor. The profession found him sideways. Through a family friend, he ended up inside a bank-owned broker-dealer environment in 2005. Proprietary products. Securities licenses. Insurance products. The old financial services machine. He was in his early twenties, and like so many people who entered that world, he was thrown into a culture where the attrition rate was brutal. Most people did not survive it. Shawn did. Not because he loved the product machine. Not because he wanted to become a financial salesperson in the old sense. Something else happened. Beneath the call nights, the proprietary products, the pressure, and the grind, he found the part of the business that lit him up. He loved being in service to other human beings. That sentence sounds simple. In his case, it became the foundation for everything that followed. The Old World of Smile and Dial The financial services world Shawn entered in 2005 still carried the echoes of an earlier Wall Street sales culture. The desk phone mattered. The call list mattered. The Monday night call session mattered. How many dials? How many touches? How many nos? How many appointments? This was not the world of polished LinkedIn content, AI-generated newsletters, automated lead funnels, podcast appearances, content engines, and digital credibility. This was still a world where a young advisor learned how to survive by picking up the phone and asking for time. Shawn remembers those nights. The lists. The teacher’s directory from his wife’s school. The names from his father’s manufacturing company. The feeling that if he could just get one or two people to say yes to a meeting, he might have enough oxygen to keep going. There was something hard about that world. There was also something useful in it. It taught rejection. It taught persistence. It taught that financial advice, before it is anything else, is a human contact sport. You had to reach another person. You had to earn a conversation. You had to sit in front of them and explain why they should trust you. You had to learn how to connect. That kind of training is unfashionable now, but not irrelevant. In fact, as Shawn and Chris explore in the conversation, one of the dangers of the modern advisory profession is that many young advisors now enter with far better technical training, but far less experience in the human grit of building relationships from scratch. They may know more planning software. They may know more tax strategies. They may even be better prepared to sit for the CFP. But they may not yet know what it feels like to need one more human being to say yes. That matters because wealth advice is still built on trust. And trust is not downloaded. It is earned. The Planner Inside the Product World Although Shawn started in the broker-dealer world, he did not fall in love with the product side of the business. He became drawn to planning. The planning was what made sense to him. Not just selling an investment. Not just recommending insurance. Not just pushing whatever the proprietary

    1h 35m

  8. May 19

    The Hidden Wealth Strategy for Owner-Operators and Small Businesses

    Connect with Sam Strasser Before you read the feature below or listen to the episode, connect with Sam Strasser, CEO and co-founder of Treasure Financial. Linkedin: Sam Strasser Company: Treasure Financial Sam is building at the intersection of corporate treasury, fintech infrastructure, registered investment advisory services, stablecoin reserves, agentic AI, and small business cash optimization. His work is aimed at a problem almost every business owner understands but too few solve well: What should your company be doing with idle cash? Treasure Financial exists to help businesses put every dollar to its highest and best use, without forcing owners, operators, CFOs, founders, and fintech platforms to manually become corporate treasury experts overnight. TL;DR Key Takeaways Sam Strasser grew up in an entrepreneurial family, surrounded by people who built companies, sold companies, and treated business creation as a natural way to move through the world. Treasure Financial is Sam’s fourth company. The idea came from a pain point he experienced directly in a previous business, where the company had about ten months of cash sitting on the balance sheet, and the bank was unwilling to offer a better yield. A conversation with the CFO of Airbnb opened Sam’s eyes to the power of corporate treasury. At Airbnb, treasury was not a back-office afterthought. It was a meaningful financial engine that helped the company put cash to better use. Sam applied similar treasury tactics to his own company and says it increased the bottom line by about 7% that year. That became the aha moment behind Treasure Financial. Treasure’s mission is to democratize corporate treasury for small and medium-sized businesses, giving them access to cash optimization strategies usually reserved for larger companies. The platform helps companies identify idle cash and allocate it across managed money market, managed treasury, and managed income strategies, with a focus on after-tax yield, liquidity, safety, and avoiding unnecessary concentration in one institution. Treasure is both a software-first technology company and a registered investment advisor. Sam sees the RIA structure as what enables the firm to serve customers properly while building the technology layer around treasury management. Treasure serves direct business customers and also offers an API product for fintechs, neobanks, FX platforms, stablecoin companies, and other financial technology businesses that want to embed treasury offerings without building the regulatory and investment infrastructure themselves. The company has around 350-plus platform customers and roughly 10 API clients, with the API side becoming a larger focus as fintech platforms look for regulated, professional treasury infrastructure. Treasure uses Apex as a custodial partner and charges a management fee that starts around 35 basis points, with lower tiers based on deposit size. The typical minimum can be as low as $10,000, but Sam says the average entry point is around $250,000, and the average customer holds around $5 million with Treasure. The company presently serves small businesses as much as $125 million in revenue. A major theme of the conversation is that most companies still leave cash sitting in checking accounts, earning very little, while banks use those deposits to generate revenue. Treasure is built to shift more of that value back to the business owner. Sam has deployed more than 75 internal agents at Treasure with a team of only seven full-time humans. Agentic AI has changed how the company works, hires, serves customers, manages operations, and thinks about scale. Sam believes advisers will still matter in an AI world, but their role will shift. They will need to become more like system designers, technologists, fiduciary interpreters, and relationship-centered guides. The deeper message: corporate treasury is no longer just for giant companies. In an era of AI, stablecoins, cash preservation, changing rate environments, and compressed business margins, every serious owner-operator needs to ask whether their idle cash is working as hard as they are. Why You Should Listen to the Full Episode This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Sam Strasser is not just a fintech interview or an RIA of the future. It is a story about a founder who saw a hidden inefficiency sitting on his own company’s balance sheet, followed that frustration into the world of corporate treasury, and built Treasure Financial to bring institutional-grade cash optimization downstream to the small and medium-sized businesses that banks too often overlook. It is about why the cash sitting in your business account may be one of the most underutilized assets in your entire enterprise. It is about why large companies have long understood that treasury is a strategic function, while smaller businesses have been trained to treat idle cash as something that simply sits at the bank. It is about why the bank’s incentive is not always your incentive. It is about what happens when cash preservation, after-tax yield, liquidity management, stablecoin reserves, API infrastructure, and agentic AI all collide inside one increasingly important category. It is also about the future of advisory work. Sam believes AI will change the role of advisers, not eliminate the need for fiduciary responsibility. The adviser of the next era may need to understand technology, systems, workflows, agents, compliance, investment architecture, and human relationship management all at once. Most of all, this episode is about stewardship: Stewardship of cash. Stewardship of business. Stewardship of time. Stewardship of family. Stewardship of the future humans who will inherit whatever systems we build now. Press play on this conversation with Sam Strasser of Treasure Financial if you are a business owner, founder, CFO, adviser, fintech builder, stablecoin operator, or family office trying to understand why corporate treasury is becoming a front-line wealth strategy. Because in a world where every dollar matters, idle cash is no longer neutral. It is a decision. An Owner Operator Who Found Treasure in Idle Cash Before Sam Strasser became the CEO and co-founder of Treasure Financial, before he was building corporate treasury infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses, before he was talking about stablecoin reserves, agentic AI, embedded treasury APIs, liquidity ladders, after-tax yield, and the future of fiduciary technology, he was a founder with too much cash sitting in the wrong place. That is where the story begins. Not with a market thesis. Not with a pitch deck. Not with a consultant’s white paper about fintech disruption. But with a problem on a balance sheet. Sam had built companies before. Treasure was not his first venture. It was his fourth. He had grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, with a father who had started and sold several companies and a broader family culture where building a business was not some exotic life path. It was normal. It was what people did when they saw a problem and believed they could bring something better into the market. That background matters because Sam did not come to treasury strategy as an outsider fascinated by financial jargon. He came to it as an operator. He had cash in a company. The cash was sitting there. And the bank was not helping. The Bank Said No At his previous company, Sam had roughly ten months of cash on the balance sheet. Like any responsible operator, he looked at that cash and wondered if it could be doing more. He went to the bank and tried to negotiate a better yield. The answer was not useful. The bank was not willing to change the economics in a way that meaningfully helped the business. That moment revealed something every business owner eventually learns, but not always clearly enough: the bank’s incentive and the business owner’s incentive are not identical. The business owner wants safety, liquidity, access, yield, flexibility, tax efficiency, and operational simplicity. The bank wants low-cost deposits that stay put. That mismatch is easy to ignore when rates are near zero or cash balances are small. But when a company has meaningful reserves, when the rate environment changes, when margins matter, and when every dollar needs to contribute to the enterprise, idle cash becomes more than a line item. It becomes a question of stewardship. Sam went looking for a better answer. That search led him to the world of corporate treasury. The Airbnb Aha Moment The breakthrough came when Sam connected with the CFO of Airbnb. That conversation opened his eyes to how large companies think about cash. At companies like Airbnb, treasury is not merely an administrative function. It is not just “where the cash sits.” It is a sophisticated internal discipline designed to manage liquidity, risk, yield, duration, tax implications, banking relationships, capital efficiency, and the highest and best use of every dollar. Sam was struck by the scale of the impact. He says that at Airbnb, a meaningful portion of revenue was coming from treasury activity. Whether someone hears that as a precise number or simply as an illustration of magnitude, the lesson was clear: corporate treasury could materially affect the economics of a business. So he began applying some of those tactics to his own company. The result, he says, was a roughly 7% improvement to the bottom line that year. That is not a rounding error. For a founder, that kind of improvement does something to the imagination. It turns a frustration into a thesis. It turns a bank account into a market. It turns a hidden operational discipline into a product opportunity. Sam realized that the problem he had experienced was not unique. Thousands of small and medium-sized businesses were likely sitting on idle cash without the tools, guidance, infrastructure, regulatory wrapper, or time to manage it well. Large companies had treasury depar

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The show that rehumanizes wealth management for clients and advisors—decoding the matters of wealth one insightful conversation at a time—so you can grow and protect both your net worth and net happiness. For the advisors, investors, and families mastering business growth, estate protection, and alternative assets like Bitcoin and private deals—all while staying sane, compliant, and fulfilled. The mission: NetWorth + Net Happiness rising together as we navigate the next world order. www.wealthmatterstome.com

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  • Creator
    Host: Chris J Snook
  • Years Active
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  • Episodes
    43
  • Rating
    Explicit
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    © Chris J Snook & Wealth Matters Media LLC
  • Show Website
    THE ATOMIQ LEVEL

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