I recently spent a few days at a retreat with a really thoughtful group of investors who've all spent a lot of time thinking about money, how to grow it, protect it, and ultimately use it to live a better life. It was hosted by Long Angle, and the conversations went far beyond investing into health, relationships, parenting, time, and the real meaning of wealth.

So today I'm sharing a recap I recorded at the event with Tad Fallows, one of the organizers and founders of Long Angle, where we break down our top takeaways from managing risk and defining your purpose to becoming your own health advocate and building stronger connections with the people who matter.

If you're wondering how to better align your time, money, and values, or you just want a smarter take on living well, you'll love this episode. And if you want to check out Long Angle, it's a free community for investors with more than $2.2 million in assets, and you can learn more at longangle.com.

Or if you want to keep upgrading your money, points, and life, click follow or subscribe. All right. Thank you everyone once again for joining us. Chris and I, and Chris's lovely wife, Amy, spent some time last night. We made sure that each of us went to one of the sessions throughout the time.

So we got coverage of everything and tried to put together the summaries of, hey, what are the top 10 takeaways from those sessions? And it's not going to be just going through, okay, here's the three points from precision medicine, or here's the two points from the women's health thing.

But it's going to be trying to put those thematically together. Yeah. One of the hardest things about this is I probably spend five to 20 hours trying to prepare for a typical episode of the podcast. And the last session ended yesterday at like, you know, three o'clock. So it was like, okay, I've got from three o'clock to this morning, and I want to spend time with you guys.

Which is more than five hours, to be clear. Yeah, it was more than five hours. I saw him in the Google Doc past midnight. I wanted to get some sleep. I wanted to, you know, hang out with people. But what I really wanted to do is, we wanted to try to synthesize this not to, here's the takeaway from this session and this session.

But like, what are the real themes that you can pull out of this? And so I think the way I'll start is, this is an event where the common thread between all of us is money. But I didn't have a lot of conversations about money. A lot of the topics weren't about money.

A lot of the things that kept people sitting by the fire late at night weren't money. And there were actually a lot of other things that seemed like you could even call them assets that were more important. We talk a lot about compounding with our investments and letting your investments grow and grow.

But one of the most important assets that came up in this retreat was health and how important your health is. And if you don't have health, and specifically the combo of healthspan and lifespan, which I'll touch on, then you can't let those assets compound because you're not around for them.

And maybe they could compound for future generations. But I'm sure we're all working hard to earn money so that we can actually use it and enrich our lives and the lives of those around us. And so there were two sessions that touched on this. And one of them really focused a little bit on the difference between healthspan and lifespan.

And so yes, you can live a long life. But if that's not an enjoyable life, that's not a really great place to be. And we talked this morning in our little group about how you want that curve of deteriorating life towards the end of your health to be as steep as possible.

You want a great quality of life all the way until the end. And then if it just all disappears, that's okay. As opposed to this slow, gradual thing that maybe we've seen parents and relatives go through where the last decade or even longer is not very enjoyable. And unfortunately, it seems that in our society, the way to tackle that is you've got to be your own advocate.

Right? I had an experience with high cholesterol. And I went to my doctor probably for the better half of 10 years. And the advice was things that weren't even true, like eat less cholesterol and eggs, which doesn't even have an impact on your cholesterol. You know, get some more exercise.

And for almost a decade, that was the advice. And finally, I took it into my own hands. And I started testing a few other biomarkers like your LP little a or your ApoB. And I was like, oh, this is real. I need to go get a coronary artery calcium score.

And it's like, oh, this cost $100. And in my case, for some reason, it was actually covered by insurance. But no doctor had ever suggested any of this. And so you really have to just take on this responsibility. Or I guess, decide that this is an area where you want to spend to outsource it to someone who is, you know, on the leading edge of that research, or just shop around, right?

I'm sure that there are doctors covered by your insurance that will do this, but they might not be the first one or the second one or the third one or the fourth one. And nowadays, there are just so many different ways to get a check as to where you are, whether it's wearing a continuous glucose monitor for a few weeks and seeing how different things impact your metabolic health, getting different biomarkers, getting MRIs, DEXA scans, genetic screenings, that can have a big impact on everything.

And just understanding where you are and having things to have a conversation with your doctor. One of the most powerful questions I asked my doctor once was, if I were willing to spend a little bit of money out of pocket, what should I be doing? And my doctor was like, what?

Like, I don't get that question a lot. And I asked it to my dentist as well. And my dentist had the easiest answer. In like a split second, he said, get a third cleaning. And I was like, really? And he's like, yeah, I can't think of anything that would be more impactful for your oral health than getting a third cleaning a year.

And I was like, oh, why doesn't everyone do that? He's like, well, because it costs $120. And I was like, okay, but like, if the most impactful thing I could do for my teeth is to spend $120 a year, that seems like people should know. He's like, well, insurance doesn't cover it, so I don't like to recommend it.

And it turns out that a lot of the guidance I've seen from my care providers is that if it's not going to be covered by insurance, they don't talk about it. But if you open the door to, well, can we talk about things that aren't covered if they're potentially not that expensive and can be really impactful?

And the answer was yes. They're interested in talking about that. And it can have a lot of impact. The only other thing I'll add is when it comes to genetic testing, one of the things my wife did was she did a genetic test after her father had the BRCA2 mutation and found out she had this BRCA2 mutation, which puts you at an incredibly high risk for breast and ovarian cancer.

And so she went to a few different doctors to try to find someone who's like, let's be really proactive about this. And there was another session here, which is where this all compounds about women's health and specifically about menopause. And I think women's health gets one percent of all health research.

So it's a very under-researched area. And a lot of the latest kind of consensus thinking from doctors might differ a lot from what doctors 20 years ago were thinking about. And so the theme in that session was the same. It's like you have to be your own advocate. Menopause impacts your entire body.

And if something's off, a doctor might say, oh, well, maybe you're not sleeping well. Here's something to help you sleep. But there could be a lot of underlying things. And so if you're not testing all of the things, and I don't mean all like go test one million biomarkers, but if you're not getting a good baseline of where you're at, when something feels off, you might not easily be able to know, well, what caused that?

Is that different from my test last year? And so she's going through the process of, I'm going to mispronounce this, but either an oophorectomy to remove her ovaries in two weeks, which is going to kick her in to some form of early menopause. And so she's, I guess, fortunate that it's not going to come as a surprise at some point, but it's something that she's going to know is about to happen.

And a lot of the people she talked to, doctors she talked to, some of them were like, well, hormone replacement therapy, I don't know, it kind of has a bad rap. I'm not sure it works. And here at the session, there was a panel of health practitioners who were all like, no, no, the research now consensus is this is a good thing to do.

And so again, if you're talking to a doctor and you don't feel like they're understanding what the latest research is, they're up to date with things. And I can understand that doctors have a lot going on. Staying on top of research is hard. Look around, do your own research, be in charge of this because she's going through the process of testing all the biomarkers to make sure that she could dial in hormone replacement therapy with a doctor who's really supportive of it.

And as a husband, I don't know if you've thought about this, like I have not ever learned anything about menopause and the impact it has on the woman's body in school, from my doctor, from my family. And so it's been really interesting to get that perspective from her, from this room and how important it is and how much can impact you.

I'm curious. I know you didn't attend the two health sessions, but have you been thinking about health a lot in your life lately? I have. And I think the biggest thing I would add, and this kind of ties into a theme that will come up a few times in different sessions here, which is what is the role of third-party professionals or service providers, you could call them, whether that's looking at your portfolio and do I want to do all my own management?

Do I get somebody else? Whether it could be in taxes, different areas. But specifically in this area of fitness, I know one thing that we've been looking at personally is what my wife asked for her birthday and said, "Hey, I want you to figure out how to get me a personal trainer who's going to come to our house every Monday and Thursday night at 7:00 p.m.

and make me work out." And it's not that she doesn't know how to work out, but having that person show up and actually be there and make her do it is a place where I say, "Hey, that'll be a couple hundred bucks a week." That's going to be the highest ROI, 200 bucks, because to your point around your health, if that actually is the thing that gets you over the hump on doing it.

So I think, you know, you were talking about how it's not just about money, even if that's a sort of common denominator of the group. And it was funny, I actually was speaking with a good friend of mine. We've been friends since freshman year of college, but she came here and she's sort of in the New York family office circuit.

And she says, "Hey, I go to a lot of family office events. This is the only one where no one's talking about investing. They're talking about everything except investing." But I do see that as an investment. Some of it can be this information of a different doctor, but some of it is just, hey, I may have all the information.

I listened to this one podcast where he said, "Hey, if knowledge was the limiting factor, we'd all be billionaires with six pack abs." It's all around, you know, how do you actually get execution? So I think that's another way to kind of throw a relatively small amount of money at the problem and get a very high return on it.

Absolutely. This episode is brought to you by Element. If you've listened to this show, you know I'm always searching for ways to optimize my life and Element is genuinely one of the simplest, most impactful upgrades I've made. I drink Element almost every day and I bring it with me every time I travel.

Here's why. Staying hydrated isn't just about water. Electrolyte imbalances can lead to headaches, fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep, and most electrolyte drinks out there are packed with sugar and dodgy ingredients. But Element is different. It's zero sugar, zero artificial junk, just a perfectly balanced mix of electrolytes and sodium that's backed by science and tastes great.

Since I started drinking Element, I've noticed clearer focus throughout the day, better sleep at night, and I'm more energized for workouts and recovery. Honestly, it's really hard to imagine going back. So whether you're an athlete or just someone like me trying to get the most out of every single day, you've got to try Element.

And they are so confident you'll love it that they offer no questions asked refunds so you can try it risk free. For all the Hacks listeners, you can get a free eight count sample pack of Element's most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase at allthehacks.com/elementlmnt. Find your favorite Element flavor or share it with a friend.

That's allthehacks.com/elementlmnt. This episode is brought to you by Viore. If you've been listening for a while, you know I am a huge fan of Viore. They make performance apparel that somehow works for every part of your day. Whether I'm lounging at home, running errands, jumping on a quick workout, or heading out to dinner, I'm usually wearing something from Viore.

And this time of year, as the weather cools down, I have been living in their Sunday Performance Joggers or Ponto Performance Joggers. Both are made with their signature Dream Knit fabric that is insanely soft but still holds up when you're moving around. And their Stratotec tee is basically replaced all of my other t-shirts.

Viore makes the perfect mix of comfort and performance, the kind of clothes you never want to take off and that are truly an investment in your business. And for our listeners, they are offering 20% off your first purchase, plus free shipping on U.S. orders over $75 and free returns.

So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at allthehacks.com/viore. That's V-U-O-R-I. Again, that's allthehacks.com/viore. V-U-O-R-I. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. The second asset that I thought, this one actually started this event. So we started this event with these circles where we got together with a group of 10 people and we just kind of talked about what's going on.

I'll share this diagnostic we did later. But the other asset that seems to be one of the highest returning assets in everyone's life, and it's not money, was relationships and people. And the theme amongst a group of, I don't know, the average age at this event, but I'd say probably mid-30s to mid-60s, like a pretty wide range, was building relationships as an adult, especially in a world where many of us are now working from home or not going into the office every day or overwhelmed with our kids such that we're not being as social as we used to be, is really hard.

And in our group, I think every single person was like, gosh, I wish I had more real friends. And this is true across almost every group. As I talk to other people, there was this common theme that having friends, which seems like such a fundamental, easy thing that we overlook, was just something that was hard for a lot of people.

We've grown apart. We've moved away from where we were because we had kids and we moved to some suburb. We moved for a job. And it seemed like a thing that really matters. And just today as we're recording this, I released an episode of the podcast with a guy named Tim Ferriss.

And we talked about relationships being the most important thing, like the thing that you should prioritize in your year before anything else, because it's what really brings actual happiness to our lives. Yet so many of us put it as like the seventh, eighth thing on our list. Well, and I think you made the point that it's hard as an adult.

And I think from what I've read about this, it's not that there's something that changes in your brain that you're no longer willing or able to make friends. A lot of it is that making friends is this structural factor of seeing the same set of people on a recurring basis in some context.

And so when you're a little kid, you're going to see those same 30 kids every day you show up at school and you're going to be friends with Chris because he's staying next to you, even if you don't have that much in common. Or when you're in college, you've got your roommates, maybe even your first job, all four of you analysts are in it together.

You're going out for drinks afterward. But the further along you get in the career, the less natural recurring interactions there are there. And you are making the point that maybe to jump ahead a little bit, that session on Lighthouse Parenting, as we were talking before, that as a parent, you're trying to help guide your kids, but you're not going and doing it for them and being next to them every step of the way.

You're kind of being a coach on it. And I think there can be this natural, especially as you have kids, this tendency of anytime I'm not doing stuff just with my kids and for my kids, it's kind of wasted time. And to recognize these relationships are important. And it's actually important to be intentional at investing in those relationships.

And it's not being selfish or taking away, but it's actually probably making you a better person and a better parent in the long run if you do invest in those things beyond just being with your kids there. And I think there's a lot of ways that intentionality can look like.

That's probably part of the reason a lot of people enjoy religion, whether the religion is for you or not. But it means that every Sunday you're going to be at church with the same set of people doing the same thing. It creates that continuity. I know for me personally, what we do on Sunday morning is not going to church.

We have a Sunday 7:00 AM pickleball game with the other dads from my daughter's class. And so that's always a highlight of the week. That was the only time that we were all free from child rearing obligations was 7:00 AM on Sunday. Everybody's tired, but they're there. And it creates those friendships.

I think similar to trusted circles. Okay, I've got these same eight guys I meet with once a month and we're carving out three hours to really have those conversations. So there's different ways it can look. But I think that intentionality is key to creating the recurrence. And the relationships don't just have to be friends, right?

This could be family. One of the most kind of impactful stories I heard was there was someone in this retreat circle that we started with who said, I've spent so much time and energy trying to work hard to accumulate assets and wealth so that I could take care of my family.

I could provide my kids the resources that they need that if they want to go do a job in nonprofit, there's some financial support so that they can live a fulfilling life and do that all at the same time. And I was talking to my daughter about it and she told me, "Dad, I don't need any of your money.

Can you just spend some time with me?" And it was really tough to even tougher for that person to hear that message. But we sometimes think about what we're doing and we don't actually step one step back and say, "What is the purpose of this?" Because if the purpose is to accumulate this money so that we can help our kids, but what the kids really want is our time, then maybe we should spend a little bit less time accumulating the wealth and a little bit more time with them.

And it's a fleeting moment that was very top of mind for a lot of people here because some people were like, "My kids are going to college in two years." Like, I have two really solid, great years with them around and some people are just getting started in the journey.

And so that was another big one for me. How do you really make sure you're spending time with people and really having good experiences? And one of those things that I think this community at large and really just our society loves to do with other people is travel. And so I think one of the takeaways was that travel really compounds when you're intentional about how you do it.

Now, this was a session I led. So instead of me talking about something I've already talked about, I'm curious what you took away, Tad, from that session. Yeah, I loved hearing you and Lee talk about it. There were a lot of hacks, if you will, on, "Hey, Argentina is a great place to go.

And here's the right way to think about Japan." But for me, I think the biggest thing that I took away listening to it, which I loved, was this idea of, "All right, let's say, are you taking a trip to Paris in order to work through your top 10 checklist?" So you get to the top of Montmartre, you take a picture.

You get to the top of the Eiffel Tower, you take a picture. You have your five seconds next to the Mona Lisa and you take a picture. Is that actually why you wanted to go to France? Or was it getting to know the culture? Or it sounded like really what you guys were talking about and the one that was most meaningful was you're actually going to France, but to have that relationship with your friends or with your family.

And you were saying that often the best trips are the second or third time you've been to a city because you don't feel any compulsion to say, "I'm going to hit the top 10 highlights here." With Paris in particular, actually, my wife is a huge Francophile. So I try to maybe every five years, we do a two of us trip to Paris.

And I don't think we've gone to Louvre once on that. You know, she's spent probably years of her life cumulatively and she's been to every museum there. But it means we just walk around and we go to the pretty parks there. Or another one like that, we actually made a decision pretty early on in my kid's life that every other year we'd go to Rome for Christmas.

Partly that's because we've got family in Rome. And partly it's because it's just it's amazing to do Christmas. It's great weather. You've got the Pope there. Every church, they're singing these Christmas carols. And tell you, New Year's there is like the Baghdad air raids. Everybody's setting off these fireworks off their desks there.

But the really cool thing about it is now that we've been a bunch of times, my kids are familiar with it. The last time we went, one of the highlights, we went to the A.S. Roma game. Another one is we found a gladiator school. So the kids got dressed up in their gladiator uniforms and we're hacking at each other.

And so really the point of the travel was not, okay, did we see the coliseum for the fifth time? But as they got their time with their grandparents, they got that time with their cousins, they got that time with the parents not distracted and in a different place. Lee said this, when somebody comes to me planning a trip, the first thing I asked them is, what are you trying to accomplish on this trip?

Do you just need a break? And like, I'm going to send you to Hawaii. You're never going to leave the resort. You're just going to lie on the beach there. And maybe you'll go for a walk and you'll have a Mai Tai and that's going to be the perfect vacation.

Are you looking to get in shape? Are you looking to reconnect with your spouse? If you know that what you're trying to accomplish beforehand, then travel can get you what you're trying to accomplish. But otherwise, and this will come up in some other things. If you put the cart before the horse and say, well, what's the perfect itinerary?

But it doesn't fit where you are in your life. You know, he's also saying, look, if you've got a newborn baby and you want to go to Europe for four days, you literally can do it. But there is no reason to go to Europe for four days for the newborn.

You should go for three weeks if you want to take that trip. Kids are an interesting thing to travel with. We took a pause because, you know, we went through that phase where they barely sit still. And now we're about to start embarking on that journey again. We've got a trip planned to Japan.

And again, for us, it's a repeat destination where we have no pressure from my wife and I to do anything. And we can just kind of see the city through our kids' eyes, which is a really interesting experience, right? To watch your children experience a thing that you've experienced in the past.

And that makes parenting sound easy. The next takeaway I have is the exact opposite. Parenting is hard. It's hard for all of us. Maybe that's the point of parenting. And maybe there's no perfect way to do it. And one of the biggest challenges I think today, you could probably walk around this room and any room and any Instagram scroll and any TikTok scroll and any blog post, and you'll find a million different results of how you should parent, what you should do, what's ruining your kids' lives.

And it might be the same thing that's enriching your kids' lives on another post. And it makes the whole thing feel overwhelming. And in some world, I kind of am envious of my parents who were like, well, we had one book and we kind of just read that book and we did what our friends did.

And like, we didn't have to think about it at all. And you could be envious of that. But there was a parent who had the exact opposite opinion. In that session, they raised their hand, said, hey, I feel like I messed it all up. I didn't have all these resources.

I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. And so it's great that we have a lot of resources to know what we are doing and how we can be better parents. But there's almost information overload to the point that you're like, oh, what should I, how should I respond to my kid?

Oh, should I look at chat? How do I respond to my kid? They just said this thing. It can be a lot. And I liked the simplicity of the lighthouse parenting concept, which Andrew explained as there's this lighthouse and your kids are riding the waves and your job is to be this grounded thing that's there, that's supportive, but not always to just go get in the waves with them, like let them deal with the struggles.

And it can be so hard to watch your kids struggle and not just try to solve the problem. But then I look back to my childhood and I was like, I was just in the woods trying to figure things out on my own. And like, that seems crazy that we would even let our kids roam free in the woods these days.

But they need to learn that independence somewhere. And they need to learn that you're there. You're reliable. You're predictable. You'll be there. You'll be there to support them. But they've got to ride those waves. They've got to figure it out on their own. And so maybe instead of giving your kids a job, make them get a real job where they have a boss that's not you.

And there are a lot of examples of things like that to just kind of help them figure it out, but not figure it out for them. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I heard a member talking about this. He was saying it's easy when they're really little. Like when your kids are trying to learn how to walk up the staircase, you have zero temptation to pick them up and put them at the top of the staircase and say, OK, you know, I solved your problem.

You're now at the top of the stairs. Enjoy yourself. But then applying that to my kids now in sixth grade and not all of his grades are where they should be. It's much harder to say, OK, well, you know, that's on you if your grades aren't where they need to be.

Or, you know, if you're going into freshman year of high school, it's going to be on their transcript. It's much harder to let them do it themselves. I'm from Texas, so we talk about grace a lot. Your idea of it's OK for your kids to fail, I would also say as a parent, there's no right answer.

We should give ourselves some grace that we're not going to get it exactly right in the parenting. I think the more we can try and do that, I think it builds on itself. Like for me, the example of this with my kids now being in middle school and certain things I'm not comfortable with them failing at, but trying to find the ones where they can.

My son has bar mitzvah recently. And going into that, I decided, you know what, this is something that we're only going to do this if this is your deal. And I told him directly, I was like, you know what, you can do it. You can not do it. You can take it seriously.

You can do a crappy job like that's totally on you. And it was amazing. I would never say that to him about math class. It would be you're going to get an A. You're going to get turned in all your homework. You're going to do it right. But when he actually knew that I meant it, that it was totally his choice how well he did it.

He was there every Saturday morning, reminding me like, oh, I got my Zoom call with Hadar, like get me on there so I can do my tutoring. And he was practicing his letters late at night. And it was up to him that that had significance, but it became a much more meaningful experience because it was something he was driving himself.

Where we can, I think we all want to try and extend that to the things that really do matter. Because also ultimately, we're not going to be there when they get to freshman year of college. You're not going to be waking them up and making sure that they get out of bed at 8:00 AM and get to class on time.

And I think it is somewhat unfair if senior year of high school, you're waking them up and making sure they're eating their breakfast and make sure they get there on time. Not only do they have to deal with college level course expectations, but they have to do their laundry for the first time.

They have to set an alarm for the first time. I think you need to see that childhood is that slow evolution where they're picking up more and more responsibility rather than having it all happen at 18. Yeah. So my kids are young, so I'm glad we got to go to this session earlier.

And my wife and I actually had a really good conversation about it after, about how we want to learn from them and learn from that session. But also this next takeaway is actually about how you can learn from your kids. So a lot of what we think about is, okay, well, we've got to teach our kids all these things.

We've got to be there for them. But there was a session that Nate Hurd did about expanding what's possible. And the premise was, you look at your kids and I look at my daughter and I'm like, well, in the morning, she is an astronaut. She's has a spaceship. She's flying around.

A few hours later, she's repairing all the damaged limbs on my other daughter. She's dressed like a doctor, has her stethoscope. Bedtime, she's a dinosaur. You know, she's a cat. She's meowing. She can be anything she wants, any time of day. And I was talking to someone here about learning to play the guitar as an adult.

And in my mind, I was like, man, I don't even think I could learn to play the guitar before I die. Like, that just seems impossible. And I'm like, my daughter thinks she can have 47 careers in her life and I can't learn to play an instrument. As adults, we forget that our imagination can just run wild and it can really expand what we think we can do in this world.

And so we went through this exercise and I brought this little book just so I can highlight a few of the things for people to remember. But we started with this diagnostic where we went through your physical health, your mental health, your meaning or your purpose, your romantic partnership, your family, your friends, your wealth and your financial mastery, your time, your adventure and exploration, you know, your self-improvement, your play, your expression, your hobbies.

And we said, let's rank ourselves on how satisfied we are. And then let's rank how important this is to us. And this actually kicked off the earlier conversations in the whole retreat, which was we sat in a group of five to 10 people and said, well, let's not talk about the things that aren't important to us or the things we're doing really well.

But let's just skip right to the end. What are the things that people are a two out of 10 satisfied and an eight out of 10 with are important? And then in this session about expanding what's possible, Nate pushed us all to just sit there and pick one of them.

So pick one area of your life. And I'll challenge anyone listening or in this room that hasn't done this exercise and say, what's an area where I'm not where I want to be? And what would it look like if I were wildly where I wanted to be? If it's, you know, hobbies where I'm taking a cooking class every day of the week, where, you know, I'm jumping out of airplanes on the weekend, like just everything you could ever want.

I'm being trained by chefs, you know, around the world, whatever it is. And it's not to say you're going to do that, but let's just treat our brains in the way that we can dream much bigger and be more creative. And then Nate's like, okay, now we're going to take another 15 minutes.

We're going to do it for all of them. And so I left with this crazy idea of how could I improve every aspect of my life at a level that is not necessarily practical. And he encouraged us to stop treating our lives. Like we do our work where it's like, wow, we've got to optimize this.

We've got to execute on this. We've got to set milestones and goals and said, you know, what's interesting is when you do that, you might hit those things, but you're thinking so short sighted when you just inspire yourself, when you think really big about where you could go, what you could do, all these possibilities that just naturally pulls you.

You don't need to set the goal because now you've created this North Star that's so inspiring. For me, I was like, well, I actually don't have a ton of friends that live nearby. A lot of my friends moved far away. It just seems impossible with kids to just drive an hour to grab a coffee with someone.

And I was like, you know, what would a crazy version of this look like? And I was like, well, we have a sauna. Like maybe I run the neighborhood sauna club. Maybe I've got like a website where people sign up and we have regular saunaing with random people until I meet more interesting people.

I've had this dream for years and many people will think I'm crazy of just like creating almost like a profile on a dating app, but as a person for friends and just put it in mailboxes. And I figured like the people I'd randomly meet through this are probably people that are interested in random weird things like me.

It's like, that could be this world. And so now I'm kind of inspired. I'm excited to do all these things. It was just really fun. Like I felt like a kid in that session, getting to think big and creatively with no restraints. I don't know. You weren't in that room, but I'm curious what you think of that exercise.

I mean, I love that exercise. I guess in the world of inspiring, the one thing that I found really inspiring here is there were a number of members I talked to, and I genuinely had not expected this, where they were successful entrepreneurs. They'd had very good exits. You know, one guy, his company's about to IPO.

Another one, he sold his company as strategic acquirer. So very successful, very smart, very driven. But they said, you know what, my next thing, I am not going to have a profit incentive. I'm going to start a nonprofit and I'm going to take all of that energy and the skills and the discipline, but toward driving that nonprofit.

So, you know, Andrew, for example, started Sober Entrepreneurs and his previous company, I believe it was a SaaS company. So he knew all the metrics of what's customer acquisition costs and what are churn rates and how do I measure impact. So he's applying all those things, this nonprofit. So he's looking at what's my CAC to get a new member and doesn't get any revenue from that member, but he's being rigorous.

He's holding his team accountable. Like, hey, you missed your numbers. We are not having the impact we are trying to have here. And so I found that really inspiring of saying, hey, you can not just pigeonhole yourself. Hey, here's the thing I started. And so I need to start another SaaS company here.

But I can, if what I care about now is not making more money, but actually having impact, you know, for him is sobriety, for another member who's around couples counseling and helping couples be more successful together. And that's where he was going to put the same energy that took him to building a public company, just toward having that impact.

So it's easy to sort of pigeonhole ourselves and say, okay, well, I'm 45 now. And my thing is doing this. And you'd think it was silly if your kid said, okay, well, you know, I'm six now. And so I'm an astronaut expert and I'm never going to branch out from astronaut.

I would imagine a 65 year old looking at 45 year olds who's pigeonholed themselves and say, well, I can only start another SaaS company. And he would say, no, that's silly. If you want to, you can, but if you've been successful here, you can try something else. And again, it doesn't have to be profit driven.

And it's not very culturally in the American DNA, but we went to Iceland and I can't remember this data. I'm going to butcher it, but I think it's like 10% of adults in Iceland have written a book. It's a wild number of people. And for whatever reason in Iceland, it's very normal for people to live their life in seasons where a doctor will be like, you know what, now I'm going to write a book.

And now I'm going to open a coffee shop. That seems normal. And in our society, it feels very strange to be like, well, I have this career. Now I'm just going to go pivot, try some totally new career, but it works. And I like hearing this story of like, let me take something I learned and apply it somewhere else.

And I think that life can be more interesting if you allow yourself to pull yourself to things you're excited about and not get too caught up in, this is the only thing that I do. The other fun, inspiring anecdote, my 10 year old daughter, very into gymnastics. So my parents live at the top of a hill.

She did 300 cartwheels in a row to get up to the top of their hill. And they're saying, grandpa, you know, I want you to do it now. So I can't, she goes, you can't do it yet, grandpa. Yeah. They just think everything's possible. This episode is brought to you by Gelt.

When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy. And as tax time gets closer, getting prepared now is so important. Now that I'm working with Gelt, I finally feel like I have a partner I can trust to handle everything for my personal and business taxes.

Think of Gelt as the ultimate modern CPA. Of course, they have an in-house team of expert CPAs to work with who can help you determine the most effective tax strategies to minimize risk and grow your wealth. But they also have an amazing tech platform that gives you personalized guidance to maximize your deductions, tax credits, and savings.

It also has an amazing document vault where you can upload all your files, tag them with relevant years, and even see when your team has reviewed each file. Beyond that, the tax library you get access to as a client has dozens of in-depth guides on everything from retirement plan choice, taxes for new parents, qualified business income or QBI, and so much more.

So if you're ready for a more premium proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes, you have to check out Gelt. And as an All The Hacks listener, you can skip the waitlist. Just head to allthehacks.com/Gelt. G-E-L-T. Again, that's allthehacks.com/G-E-L-T to stop overpaying on taxes. This episode is brought to you by Fabric by Gerber Life.

I think most of us have a list of things we know we should do, but never quite get around to. And for a lot of people, life insurance is one of them. But if you have a family that's depending on you, that is not something you want to put off.

And Fabric makes it so easy. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you, all online, on your schedule, right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. Fabric has flexible policies to fit your family and your budget, like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day.

And if you're young and healthy, the time to lock in low rates is now. And best of all, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, there's no risk and you can cancel at any time. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/allthehacks.

That's meetfabric.com/allthehacks, M-E-E-T-fabric.com/allthehacks. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. All right, so your imagination can be really valuable and it can make you think of amazing things. But another theme that I took away from this event is, especially as we talked about more tactical and strategical, that's not even a word, more tactical and strategic things about assets and wealth, there were people talking about these complex structures.

And you could probably apply this to the same story with travel planning, where you've come up with this complex way to do something and you rewind and say like, did we actually define the objective of it before we did it? I went to the session, I think we both did on estate planning and I was like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.

I'm like, do I need this? Like when it comes to estate planning, Chris started saying there are things people need, right? Like you should have some document that dictates what happens with your assets and who will make health care and financial decisions if you're unable to. Like we need those things.

And who's taking care of your kids? And who's taking care of your kids? Like what happens to your children if you're not around? But at least at present, I think each person starting next year has about 15 million dollars per person. So a married couple, about 30 million dollars of exemption for leaving money to other people who aren't your spouse or aren't a charity.

And so we love in this world and in in this community finding creative ways to save on taxes and earn a higher return. But if you're sitting there without anywhere near 30 million dollars and thinking about how cool it would be to set up a dynasty trust or some crazy life insurance private placement thing to try to avoid the taxes, that in all reality, you're never going to face.

Like you can get excited about it. But if you rewind and say, is this even for me? You might find that you didn't actually start with the same question Lee posed about travel is like, what's the purpose of this whole thing? Because the purpose might not actually matter in your circumstance.

I agree. And there was another session that Josh Cantor did on the similar idea, less in the weeds of, OK, what are the exact difference between a crat and a crud and a slat and a grat, et cetera, but just taking one step back on what are we trying to accomplish with transferring wealth to the next generation?

And so he did some interactive polls. First one was how much of your structure you have in place? And I think most people felt pretty good. Like, OK, I have a set of trusts in place. I've got a bunch of the entities there and I have my assets properly domiciled in the various ones.

And then he had one just free form. What is the objective you're trying to accomplish? And the top three answers were, I'm not sure. I don't know. And I have no idea. So everybody, they'd optimize their whole structure. I'd say I'm in the exact same position myself. I submitted, I voted, I have no idea.

I think that's a big one before the other. And I think it can be stressful too, because it feels like one of these things when you look at estate planning, it only really works if it's irrevocable. But the nature of irrevocable is you can't take it back. You want to do as soon as possible, but as soon as possible is when your kids are really little.

And so you end up in this kind of tension where you're trying to optimize about it. And another thing that I thought was interesting when Chris was talking about the way these structures worked is that for a very long time, the English for centuries had this principle of no perpetuity.

So you can't just put your money in what we now call a dynasty trust and have it compound for 1,000 years. And the tax man can never do it. You know, even the English thought that was a bad idea to have dynastic wealth build up in that way. For various reasons, the U.S.

has moved away from that policy. So we now can put your money away for 1,000 years. But Chris was saying, you know, if you think about it, that means that William the Conqueror, when he took over England, if he put his money in a dynasty trust, that trust he set up would still be enforced today.

And so this idea of saying just because you can plan 1,000 years out and try and, you know, rule it from the grave, that's not necessarily the best thing to do. Or at least you should think carefully about what those things are before you start just putting a South Dakota trust in place.

Yeah. And this applies outside of even trust, just thinking in your investment policy. Like, what is my goal with my investments? What are these assets for? If the assets I'm trying to invest in are for 20 years, I might take a different risk profile or liquidity profile than if I'm trying to save for my down payment that I need to make on a home.

So just really thinking in advance on what I'm trying to do before I get all excited about the structure that I could create, the tax loophole that I've found, making sure it actually even fits in with what you need to do. Well, as you and Lee were talking about the travel session, you talk about a lot, what's the most efficient use of points.

They're saying, hey, if you find a killer deal on a flight to Frankfurt, if you didn't actually want to go to Frankfurt, you really shouldn't buy that killer deal on the flight to Frankfurt. Yes. And so you can create these complex structures. And oftentimes what they do is they try to reduce risk.

But one other key theme from this week for me was that you can try to reduce risk, but you really shouldn't think about it because you're not going to eliminate risk. You're really trying to manage it. And there were two big moments talking both about insurance and really like personal and online security where I thought risk really came out as a theme.

And in a world where just more information and more things going on, risk can really play a role. You talked about insurance and went to that session. I'm curious what the big takeaways were. The concept of the session was two things. Hey, why are insurance rates going up so quickly?

And especially in places like California where you live, but also Florida, Carolina is Texas. Why am I getting dropped entirely? And then what can I do about it? In terms of why they're going up, a lot of interesting factors there, whether it is climate change, whether it's insurance has been just an unprofitable business.

So insurers are trying to pull out of it largely, whether it's that people are building in high wildfire risk areas, a bunch of reasons like that. But in terms of what to do about it, I think the key thing he was saying is, look, insurance is really just a contract where you're moving risk from one person to another person.

But it is not a particularly efficient way to do it. If I have $1,000 of risk, pushing that to you is probably going to cost $1,500 when I look at different brokers and middlemen and that sort of thing. So to really think about the only kind of risk you should try and push off is really catastrophic risk that you can't afford.

So if you're in a position where you could afford $1,000 loss, you should not buy AppleCare because if you lose your iPhone, you can just pay $1,000 to get a new AppleCare. And Apple has priced their AppleCare such that it's going to be a lot more expensive than the value you're actually getting.

But the same thing scales up to your home insurance. If you get $1,000 deductible, so if you have a $2,000 claim, you're taking it. If you could have afforded to pay that $2,000 out of pocket, both your premium will be much lower. And in just two or three years, you will save the money by having that higher deductible.

And you'll also honestly remain insurable. He was saying that he has clients to come to them. I've got a ton of money. They're very successful, lots of assets. But they have put in four little nickel and dime claims over the last five years, said, you are literally uninsurable. I cannot get any carrier in the country to insure you.

Lloyd's will not insure you because you put in these small claims here, which is frustrating. You say, well, I have this. I want to go ahead and take advantage of it. But it's because they're not thinking about insurance as purely a contract to move catastrophic risk. My house burned down.

My spouse got cancer. I got in a car crash with a school bus. Those are the times you have insurance. It's anything you can cover yourself. You should set your deductible. And there's not one answer. Is that right deductible $10,000 or $100,000? It really depends on how much money you have and how much buffer you can afford.

But to really move it a lot higher. And the other thing he was saying is that, again, it is just this transfer of risk that you started with. So think about the risk that you are creating. So I own a house in a high wildfire risk area of California.

And I'm always moaning that I can't get anybody to insure my house. Well, I'm actually the problem there because I own a house in a very high wildfire risk. And so it's just a very expensive liability to have. And nobody feels like picking that up on my behalf. And so if you think about, you know, it's not just California.

Again, if you buy a beach house on a hurricane prone area of Florida and it's not brand new built to this superstructure code, there's a lot of risk there. And so insurance is not some silver bullet. You know, if you want to transfer that risk, you're going to have to pay a lot because you create a lot of risk in the first place.

So those are a couple of things I took away from it. Yeah. My two takeaways were one, just tactically look at your insurance policy and look at the deductible and ask yourself, would I even make a claim if something were slightly over that? And if you have a $500 deductible on your car and you got into a minor accident and there's $700 of damage, I think making that claim to get reimbursed the extra $200 is going to increase your premiums by way more than $200.

So ask yourself at what level, you know, if you total the car, yeah, you probably make that claim. So find the level at which you would actually use the insurance and increase your premium to that level because otherwise you're just overpaying for your insurance. And so that's the one thing that I would encourage people to do.

And then also if you're ever buying property, absolutely check the cost to insure that property before you close on it. Because I have had some friends look in places in California and they're like, oh, we found this place. It's awesome. And then when they finally looked at the insurance, they're like, wow, like I can't even get insurance easily for this home.

Or you can't get it full stop. You know, Lloyd's of London will not cover you. It's just can't be covered. And also, you know, one other thing on those tactical thing he shared is the claims follow the home. So if the person who owned that before you, if they had a water leak and they put a claim, when you're trying to insure that house that you bought, you're going to be dinged for that claim they put in because the insurer is going to say that home is risky.

So that's another tactical thing to look out for. I wonder if you can actually like, you can actually see the history of claims on that home. You can talk to your broker about it. And there's one specific risk that I took away from this event that I think I hadn't really thought about when it comes to investing.

And that is that right now, I used to think that the easiest way to invest, just put your money in the US stock market. It's just so simple, right? Buy the S&P 500. Don't worry about anything else. You know, don't worry about all these crazy investments. That's pretty diversified.

There's a lot of different types of businesses and different industries in the US. So you're good. There was a session about private investments and all the private markets and going beyond that traditional 60, 40 portfolio. And one of the takeaways was if you actually look at the S&P 500 and you look at the US stock market, you are very concentrated.

It is not as diversified an investment vehicle as it once was. And even if you look at just at the broad US economy and say, well, yeah, lots of things are concentrated in technology, right? Like, do you know what percentage of the S&P 500 is technology? I mean, it's pushing 50%.

It's something crazy. And even often they say, well, Apple's not really technology, that's consumer. But anything a normal human thinks of as technology is probably half of your S&P. And you take that and then you look at, well, there's even a lot of technology opportunity outside of the public markets.

I think OpenAI's recent valuation was $500 billion. You have companies staying private so much longer. And so if you're not looking at diversification beyond one single index fund, one single kind of geography, you're probably under diversified. And that could look like different funds that you don't have to go search long and hard for, but it also could look like other geographies.

And I think on top of that, I bet a lot of your listeners live in the Bay Area or somehow work in tech. So then they're compounding that personal career concentration on tech with then their retirement savings, their emergency fund are also heavy into tech there. And I think it's tricky because it's something where if you look at today, if you said 10 years ago or 20 years ago, I'm all in the S&P or even more, I'm all in on the NASDAQ, I'm all in on the FAANG stocks, you have made a fantastic bet.

And I think that one of the hard things about looking at this stuff, a 10 or a 20 year sample size is not actually statistically significant. So it could be your whole adult life and feel like, well, of course, you know, it's smart to bet on Facebook, it's done great, or smart to bet on Google, it's done great.

But I think we should all be humble that there's a significant degree of luck there. And so if you say, hey, my history is not just what's happened in the US in the last 30 years since I've been investing, but actually what's happened global in, you know, different equity markets over the last 150 years.

If you were in 1920s, Buenos Aires and looking at say, hey, I've been all in on Argentina, this has been a great bet. Argentina is one of the 10 richest countries in the world, I'm just gonna only buy Argentine government debt and Argentine equities. That's been a terrible bet for you for the last hundred years.

And not that I think the US is going there. But I think we should all realize that the whole point of diversification is that we don't have a crystal ball on what's going to happen. And so I think that can be geographic, as you're saying, if you don't just buy US stocks, like a good example is, if you happen to have bought German defense stocks, when Russia invaded Ukraine, you're up 10x now.

Now, I'm not saying everybody should be going and thinking about third order implications of different geopolitical events. But just by the nature of if you'd owned European stocks, you would have had German defense stocks and they'd gone up at the same time something else was going down. So it can be that.

It can also be looking outside of equities. You know, it can be looking at real assets like timber, land, oil. It can be looking at less real assets like Bitcoin. It can be looking at credit. There's a lot of those different ones asset class wise. And as you said, there's both public markets and private markets, which have their own different dynamics there.

And I think some of the sessions you were talking about is, OK, if I have a significant level of assets, if I'm a qualified purchaser and I can make $100,000 investments, I have 10 million, I can get these complicated things. But you don't have to be at that level.

There's a lot of easily publicly tradable things that may not be quite as good exposure to those diverse fires, but are fully liquid and you can get into for $100. So whether you look at REITs that are investing just in U.S. farmland, you can buy U.S. farmland REIT at probably, you know, $20 a share to put as much as you want there.

Or, you know, whether that's investing in energy companies or international ETFs or Bitcoin tracking funds. So these are not only applicable to those with significant access and the ability to get the best access, it can go sort of anywhere on the net worth ladder. Yeah, I think I'd always mentally thought there's all these better asset classes that you get access to as you have more money.

And I think the real trade off is there's these two spectrums of diversification and liquidity. And if you have more money, you can get into a set of assets that you can't without more money. That is true. But most of those assets, the trade off isn't just better return for access.

It's often better return for a lot less liquidity. And so, yes, if you have less assets, you might not have access to them. But most people who don't have that many assets probably don't want assets that are going to be tied up for 10 or 15 years. And so there's kind of two spectrums of trade off.

And so you can still get exposure to those asset classes. You might not get the same return, but it's because they're fully liquid. And I would also say there's sort of an information arbitrage here. I think one of the best things about public markets is they perform price discovery.

So if you're blindfolded and pick 50 stocks at random, you're going to get general index like returns. And that's actually one of the things that doesn't bother me that much to kind of pick random stocks, because you're sort of entertaining yourself and you're really just investing alongside the overall economy.

But that's not true in the private market. So I think the other thing is it is much more difficult to diligence those. And if done correctly, you get the alpha of that. But if done randomly, you get the negative alpha of doing it randomly. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass.

If I'm trying to rewrite something or do some research, AI tools have been great. But when I'm really trying to learn something meaningful in my business or my life and really build some mastery, I love to turn to an expert or mentor. And one of the first places I look for that is Masterclass.

Masterclass is the only streaming platform where you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more. And if you're short on time, you can get thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules.

You can learn to win negotiations with FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, unlock investing fundamentals from Wall Street Pros, master leadership with top CEOs like Bob Iger and Howard Schultz. But it's not just business topics. I am loving the new Science of Parenting series right now and learning so much about being a better parent to our two girls.

With Masterclass, plans start at just $10 a month billed annually and come with a 30-day money back guarantee. And right now our listeners get an additional 15% off any membership at allthehacks.com/masterclass. Thank you for being here today. You can find all the links, promo codes, and discounts from all our partners at allthehacks.com/deals.

They're all brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us. One of the takeaways I got from this event is you can earn money, but you can also let trying to optimize the amount you earn and the amount of taxes you pay really just take over your mind share, your hours of the day, your emotional state.

One example was around becoming a qualified real estate professional. This was in the tax planning session and it's a thing you can do. There are very few ways that you can take a loss on a business and apply that loss against your income from a high-paying W-2 salary. And that is a way you can do it.

But if you're thinking, "Gosh, how do I eke out a little extra tax alpha? How do I save a little bit of money this year?" And now all of a sudden you're two years in and you're like, "Well, I got it. I got my little alpha right there." And then your friend says, "Well, what would you do?" He's like, "Well, I became a qualified real estate professional.

I spent a thousand plus hours a year doing this. I documented it all. I went to the trade conferences. I did all this stuff." And they're like, "Do you even like doing that?" You're like, "No, but I saved $3,000." You know, like you can let the kind of tax dog- The tail wag the dog.

Yeah, exactly. And you don't want to unless you want to. Yeah. No, I think a lot of those, if they actually fit the lifestyle that you want to have, they're a fantastic one. So I have a great friend back home, the managing director of a law firm. He makes probably millions of dollars a year.

His wife is a realtor. For them, it's fantastic because she was already a realtor. She enjoys being a realtor. And now their rental properties, their paper losses are deducting from his huge profits from the law firm. But they're not actually jumping through any hoops they wouldn't have otherwise have had.

But if I'm trying to become a realtor, that's crazy. Yes. And Guy Raz gave a talk and he had a really profound kind of statement, in my opinion, was that he's interviewed people that have far out accumulated wealth than he has. Billionaires, 100 millionaires. And he said, "Beyond a point, the money doesn't really matter.

I can do all the things I need to do." And I'm not necessarily chasing that. And I think we could probably all learn a little bit of his acceptance of, I'm at a place that lets me do what I want. And I know we're all competitive. We're all curious.

We all want to achieve more and more and more. But for the same reason, you might want to stop focusing on the accumulating side and spend time with someone. You might want to stop focusing on it just to regain your own sanity, because maybe it doesn't matter. And I'm surprised that someone who's so exposed to people that are on that journey and have 10x, 100x, 1,000x their wealth, he just seemed very grounded about it.

No, I agree. And it got to your point around the precision medicine talk and the person there making the point that, hey, no one in this room would switch places with Warren Buffett. You would have a thousand times as much money, but you don't want it because it comes with the other trade-off of you're about to die.

And so this same idea here of, as Guy Raz said, I have enough money to do whatever I want. There's nothing that a billionaire can do that I can't do that I actually want to do. I can go on a yacht, but if I don't want a yacht, then...

Yeah. He's like, I don't want to fly private. I don't want a yacht, so I don't need those things, but I can hang out with my kids. And in the same episode I did with Tim Ferriss, he was like, you know, it's not that expensive to go on a trip with your friends.

It doesn't mean you need to fly a G5 to Europe and live on an island. You could just like rent an RV and go camp in the woods. You know, there's a lot of things you can do to have the similar emotional experience with people you love that don't cost a lot of money.

And the more you accept that, the easier it is to stop focusing on accumulating money and letting your optimization of your taxes, letting the extra percent you want to eke out of your portfolio kind of drive where you spend your time and energy. Although I would just build on that to also be a little less philosophical and more tactical.

I think there's another place where you can make a mistake on over optimizing for taxes, which is if you let yourself become way over concentrated, there's certain strategies you can make. You can say, okay, I'm going to donate it to a DAF and that'll help. Or maybe I'll do an exchange fund or I'll do some direct indexing, things that mitigate that tax.

But if you are so maniacally focused on just not paying taxes and say, I'm going to follow this buy, borrow, die framework and the IRS will never touch it. You can just from a pure, selfish financial self-interest perspective, make a big mistake. I'm a little older than you are.

So I do remember, you know, the dot-com bubble and there were people who had 10 million dollars of WorldCom or AOL or Lucent. They said, well, I don't want to sell and pay 4 million in taxes on that. Well, their 10 million of pets.com went to literally zero. And so by just focusing on the tax aspect, they made a terrible personal financial decision.

So being willing to say, you know what, the taxes is part of the picture, but it is not the whole picture on my financial management. And to anyone in that position, I always push them to just pretend their broker or their spouse or someone just mistakenly sold the asset they don't want to sell because of the tax consequence or the current price.

And then just pause and say, okay, we made this mistake. Do we want to rebuy it? If that person who had 10 million dollars of pets.com stock that didn't want to sell it because they thought, God, there's a big tax hit. Let's pretend they did by accident. Now they're sitting on six million dollars after taxes.

Do they want to dump it all into pets.com right now? Like, is that truly what they would do? And if the answer is no, like if you wouldn't do the inverse of selling and buy that day, then you probably should be on the sales side. The final takeaway that I had from this event, I know you did too, because we talked a lot about it this morning, was that it's great when you can sit down and have someone say, hey, here's exactly what you should do.

But the reality is everyone's in a different place and there's no one size fits all answer, which is not the best thing to hear. But for everyone, it's not just about the right answer from a, is this what you should do or not in terms of the actual tactics, but is this something you enjoy doing?

And I think about contrasting a session I went to on doing due diligence for investments with a session on health, which might not seem similar at face value. But they are both areas that I think people in this room, people broadly listening, want to spend time on investing and accumulating money and living longer and being healthier.

And you can choose which ones you want to advocate for yourself on or which ones you want to outsource. And as I was thinking about the health session, I was like, I really enjoy this. I enjoy doing research, trying to find research reports, going down chat GPT rabbit holes.

And I was listening to Matt talk about all of the things that they do on the long angle investment team to evaluate investments. And he's like, here's what we do. Here's who we talk to. Here's the research we buy. Here's the people in our network. We can go validate whether this deal is as good as it seems.

There was a story about an ATM deal that it's like on face value, it looked like an incredible investment. But if you actually just look at the data about how the ATM industry is doing, you would have known this was a terrible deal. Would I have done that if I were evaluating this deal on my own?

Probably not. And I was thinking, gosh, on one hand, when you think about outsourcing things, you're like, I got to pay someone to do something I could do. But if you couldn't do it as well, and the result of that in the investment side is you make a few bad investments.

Well, those bad investments absolutely probably would have outweighed the cost to hire a professional to do that service, whether that's a professional manager that takes a percentage or a professional person to do due diligence for you that you pay hourly. And the same is true on your health. If you're not going to take it seriously, maybe hiring a private concierge medicine doctor or just someone that isn't as far down the cost spectrum of concierge, but is just a practice where maybe you pay a little bit of extra to get a little bit more care, spending that extra money to have someone else thinking about your health, someone who's maybe has a couple extra resources from that fee to hire staff to do research, to spend more time with patients, finding the place where you want to spend the time and energy.

And you can do that. You don't need to outsource that. But for each person, that's different. For my wife, she is the personal trainer that your wife hired for me. Like, she doesn't need someone to come to the house. She is so diligent to the point that I'm like, gosh, I'm looking bad here.

Like, I need to exercise more. She's making me look bad. For us, that's not something that would make sense. For you, it's 100% the most valuable money you're spending. And we didn't talk at all about the conversation you had with Kai from Marketplace. But when he talked about the economy and he talked about the K-shaped recovery, which for people who haven't thought about this, it's not just an up and down.

It's a lot of different trajectories of what happens in different industries. It just makes me think that you might think something is happening in the economy in your life. But that doesn't mean that the impact of it on you and your industry and your family is the same as the impact of that exact event on many other people.

Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, I think one other really interesting example for me is we had a couple of sessions we said on estate planning, and I felt like that was a archetypical example of one size doesn't fit all. So ironically, I was talking with Chris, who is an incredible estate tax lawyer, where, you know, servers, centimillionaires, and billionaires have these great structures.

And I was like, all right, because how about you? Like, do you actually have your house in a Q-pert? He said, well, no, I don't have my house in a Q-pert, but my doctor might prescribe me chemo. That doesn't mean he's going to prescribe himself chemo if he doesn't have cancer.

So it's really, does this tool make sense for you? Whereas conversely, I was talking with another member here who, he is not a estate tax attorney, you know, he runs a business, but he said he's paying an estate tax attorney $1,800 an hour and paying them for a lot of hours.

And then he hired another entirely separate firm and also paying them $1,500 an hour to redo the same thing. Because he's saying, in my case, if I get this 1% wrong, that is going to blow out of the water paying a law firm $100,000 or $200,000 to get it right.

So I think just a perfect example of there is not one answer. It really just depends on your personal situation, whether it makes sense to take this thing to the nines or really ignore it because it's not going to get you any mileage. I had the same conversation. I had a friend who said, should I hire a CPA?

And I had this conversation about whether their taxes were complicated enough that they could just do it themselves or use TurboTax. And I have another friend who was like, how many CPAs should I hire? Because his philosophy was taxes based on the type of income I have in the businesses I run are so complicated that everyone seems to always mess something up.

So do I hire two and then have them, you know, compare their returns to hire three, like for them, that extra cost was negligible compared to the cost of a mistake. For the other friend, it was like, you know what, TurboTax is great. Goes back to the just don't think that because someone is doing a thing that it's the best thing for you.

And, you know, this applies to money, but it applies way more broadly. And so my broader takeaway is, you know, we all think about money all the time. We all you know, it's this thing that in our society fuels a lot of what we do, how we spend our time.

But when you sit down and you sit in a room of people where you don't really have money as a topic, right? You just take money off the table as something we think about. There are a lot of human problems that we all have that in some ways seem pervasive across every level of income and wealth that we're probably not spending as much time on.

And if we actually asked ourselves, hey, how would you like to focus your time and energy? Like what's most important to you? At the end of the day, is it about the people? Is it about your health or is it about your money? Is it about your career? I bet most people listening, most people in this room would probably prioritize relationships and health over money and career.

And then you say, well, how do you spend your time every single day? How do you spend your time on the weekends? Is it actually focusing more on your career and your money? And like, are you completely contradictory towards the things you actually care about and what can we do to try to change that and force ourselves to align where we spend our time and energy with everything that we care about?

I couldn't agree more. I think that's all I've got. Tad, thank you so much for putting this event on. Every year I look forward to coming and meeting everyone and having a community to talk to. And then I love that we do this at the end because it just forces me to actually process everything I've learned.

Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks again for the session that you did on travel there. Yeah. All right. Thanks everybody for being here. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. As always, email is podcast@allthehacks.com. If you want to learn more about Long Angle, I'm a member.

It's an amazing community for investors with more than 2.2 million in assets. You can learn more at longangle.com. That is it for this week. I will see you next week.