Cole Snell Podcast Transcript
Cole Snell joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive today’s guest is Cole Snell. Cole Snell is a serial entrepreneur and author with a diverse background spanning multiple industries from food to fintech in 2018. He was introduced to a novel approach to personal finance using whole life insurance, a move which fueled his passion for the financial industry.
He recognized the need for a more accessible understanding of whole life insurance and founded life tech design to fill this void. Life Tech Design provided tools to demystify whole life insurance, offering invaluable resources for families and financial advisors. Cole also pioneered and authored a book on the child millionaire concept, underscoring the potential benefits of well-structured whole life policies for a child’s future financial stability.
Simultaneously, Cole noted a compelling parallel between whole life insurance and digital assets, particularly in their capacity to provide independence from traditional finance systems. Recognizing an opportunity, he assembled a team to create Infineo, a company digitizing whole life insurance using the blockchain and ai.
Cole Snell: Well, good afternoon, Cole. Welcome to the show!
Brian Thomas: Nice to be here, Brian!
Awesome. Great to have you on here and I appreciate you making the time hailing out of the Bahamas right now. Normally we stick to the continental U. S. mostly, but we have done 50 countries. I think Bahamas, you might be my second guest out of the Bahamas, by the way, but I appreciate you making the time, like I said, and Cole, I want to jump right into your first question.
Your entrepreneurial journey spans diverse industries, including food and FinTech. Could you share how your experiences in the food industry influenced your approach to financial services and led to the founding of Infineo?
Cole Snell: Yeah, that’s actually my favorite question to answer. They relate to each other remarkably well, and really, at the end of the day, it’s a story of value.
It’s a story that a lot of entrepreneurs, unfortunately, get wrong. They don’t spend a lot of time digging into their value proposition. I say to entrepreneurs all the time, describe to me your value proposition in a sentence or less. And back it up and you watch them kind of stumble because they forget to really dive into it and then own it.
So, the value proposition and the connection between food and finance is really, really very critical without both you die. That’s my value proposition. So people say to me, what’s your value proposition without food? What happens? Well, you die. And without money, what happens? Well, you die. It’s just true. I mean, it’s just really a fact.
And the big moment for me moving from food to finance was the fact that I realized that food was not in fact the lowest common denominator. I thought that food for the longest time, and I sold it with passion, with zeal, with gusto. I sold food like it was the last thing on earth because I felt that I was right.
If you didn’t You died. So, I had my sales team out there telling stories, adding value, bringing farmers to the table. I had a lot of success right around when the food network first came up about 12, 13 years ago, when the word artisanal when organic be kind of became to hit when farm to fork be kind of came a thing.
I was able to apply actually some technology and then some blockchain technology to the end consumers connection to say the farmer or the person growing the food. So, this whole idea of, of artisanal able to connect that sold it with passion, sold it with zeal, made a bunch of money, put some high quality food on people’s tables.
And then my sales team came back to me and said, Hey, Cole, we have a problem. I said, what is it? And they said, our food is very expensive. People can’t afford our food, but I knew our food was the best food. It had the best story. It was the healthiest, the most nutritional, the most nutritious and the most interesting.
It was engaging for people. People wanted to have it. They wanted to ingest it. They wanted to put it in their bodies. They wanted to feed it to their children. They wanted to put it on their tables. But they couldn’t afford it. That’s when I realized that food is not the lowest common denominator. It was finance.
It was money. Money is the lowest common denominator. And we didn’t want to admit it. We’re not foraging or growing our food. We’re buying it. And that’s when I sold the business and moved and took my show into the financial industry.
Brian Thomas: Amazing story. Love that. We start out with a good question, kind of telling everybody your backstory or the guest backstory, but you’re absolutely right.
It’s food and finance are what keeps people moving and shaking in the world. Appreciate it. I think it’s interesting. The story that you brought up here and how you move from food to finance. So, Cole, you’ve authored a book on the child millionaire concept, highlighting the benefits of well-structured whole life policies for children’s financial futures.
Can you elaborate on this concept and its potential impact on long term financial stability?
Cole Snell: Absolutely. And thanks for the question, Brian. It’s a good one. I spoke about value. I’ll continue to theme for me has always been value. And really again, diving into, you know, what is your value proposition? So now I find myself.
Smack dab in the middle of the financial industry. I had an exit. I had some money at the time. My financial advisor, his name was rich. He came to me and he said, Cole, you have a problem. You have too much money in your checking account. And I said, okay, well, I agree with that. I go, but rich, where do I put it?
And he said, he, he said to me, Cole, you put it in life insurance. And I laughed so hard. I knew this guy quite well. I thought he was making a joke. I literally keeled over. I said, okay, that’s really funny, rich. Well, he’s no call. I’m dead serious. And then he goes, he handed me a book and was a book by actually now one of my business partners is Dr Robert Murphy and an Austrian economist, he goes, go read this and essentially what Dr. Murphy suggested in his book was that life insurance in kind of directly and indirectly is Austrian economics and action.
I was a big believer in Austrian economics for your listeners. There are three different types of economic models. There’s a Keynesian model, there’s a Chicago school, and there is the Austrian school of economics. Now, the Austrian school suggests in very simple terms, capitalism, it suggests that if a business were to be failing the government shouldn’t step in and bail it out because it would be a bad investment because the business is failing. So let it fail. Let the ashes fall where they may. And let’s see what rises out of those ashes. It’s likely, you know, a stronger business that doesn’t need to be bailed out by say, quantitatively eased fiat currency.
I digress. So I read this book and I said to Rich holy cow and this is after a year of doing the work and because rich was adamant rich was adamant that my capital was safer in life insurance and then he said to me I said to rich you know rich life insurance is a bad investment from what I could tell life insurance is a bad investment so why would you tell me to put my money into life insurance he goes Cole, I didn’t tell you to invest your money into life insurance because I agree life insurance is a bad investment.
I told you to put your money into life insurance. In other words, he was suggesting that my capital needed to exist somewhere. And once I did the work, he suggested that I would see mathematically and economically that my money is better held in life insurance companies as a quote unquote bank. Versus a traditional bank again, he suggested to me that your capital needed to exist somewhere.
So, I did the work, and I realized that he was right, but I also realized that to amass my newfound capital from my exit into life insurance companies, I needed to go through a lot of pain. I needed to go through a lot of friction, a lot of blood, a lot of urine, a lot of medical and financial scrutiny and underwriting.
It took me years to amass 14 policies. In three different countries and to be able to move my capital into life insurance. Now, life insurance eventually became my bank. So, through this friction to get to the point of your question through this friction, I determined that the easiest way to set up a life insurance quote unquote as a bank.
And to use it, quote, unquote, as a bank, I keep saying that because it’s not a bank. It’s again, a warehouse of capital, really, at the end of the day that you can leverage and use very similar to how you would use, say, your checking account. This can be done. It’s a vehicle called essentially cash value dividend paying.
Whole life insurance, ideally from the mutually owned company, again, not an investment. And this is also not an investment advice, but it is used as a warehouse of your capital. I keep saying it because people really get it twisted. They really want to take my words and think that I said that life insurance is a good investment and I’m not doing that.
But I said to myself, well, how do you start this? This banking system early and it became it was a seminar that I sat in. I was trying to figure out the life insurance industry. I’m not from the life insurance industry, but I recognized pretty quickly that the lessons I learned from my financial advisor rich needed to be shared with the world.
There was a lot of value there. And I thought to myself, well, how does the average American get into this without all the friction? And I was sitting on a seminar and a person explained to me and I was trying to learn life insurance. I was trying to figure this all out. And this gentleman, his name was Jody and Jody said in the seminar, you can get life insurance on your child at 15 days old.
And I was blown away by that. I didn’t understand why you would do that, or that was even possible. But again, I started to do the work. I started to research it. And I realized that you could start creating this banking kind of quote unquote system literally at 15 days old. So I wrote a book called child millionaire, be the change agent for your family’s future.
Because I recognize that if a parent and then Dr Murphy, who I spoke to previously wrote a white paper on it, I realized that as a parent, you could put 50 or 100 a month for 20 years, you know, a net total distribution into a child’s life insurance policy of, say, 24, 000 over 20 years. And that would amass over time through milestone ages of that child, whether if it’s going to university, getting married, retiring, or even at death at the time that we all graduate from this earth, it would leave a windfall of money, millions of dollars to the next generation tax free.
Now, then what happens here, and this is where the value is, Brian, the value now becomes trading financial literacy, which we’ve all been told to get rich. We need to understand how markets work, how investing works, how trading works, and then have a whole bunch of discipline to not touch your money and just let it sit there.
So, between discipline being hard for the average person and financial literacy being almost impossible for the average person, I mean, go try and talk to a finance bro and understand what’s coming out of their mouth. All these pretentious acronyms that mean nothing to anyone and just create uncertainty and fear and make people run away.
The answer and the value is in financial stewardship. I like cars because my father liked cars. He liked cars because his father liked cars. Unfortunately, I really like cars a lot and I wish I didn’t, but I do because it’s in my family. I do it because my father did it. He did it because his father did it.
Life insurance and putting a hundred dollars a month into your child’s. Future and your generational future will happen because of stewardship. Money will just flow from generation to generation because the previous generation did it and it worked, and everyone was born into millions of dollars. So, I asked Dr Murphy to take my book and write a white paper on it and drill it down economically and mathematically.
What would it look like in four or five generations if every American did this and every American family did it? Well, Brian, consumer debt would be wiped out. You would not have this pressure and this and this stress. And actually, Dr Murphy, I’m not going to say who, but during the recent election, consulted with a couple of very prominent people who are household names today on outside of the box economic ideas and how one might get elected.
If they were to bring these ideas forward, and what he shared was the idea of the white paper and the book that we could pass a mandate in America that found a 100 for every child or 50 for every child on a sliding scale to ensure that they had the ability to put money into this family banking system.
Now, it didn’t get put forward, but it still might because the doge is doing some pretty progressive things, and I’ll leave it like that. That was long winded, but I wanted to capture the whole thing.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And that’s great. I learned a lot here and that’s what I like about the podcast, but our audience is certainly going to learn a lot about economics.
And I think it is important that we learn what some of the, I mean, families like the Rockefellers have done for generations with the money and these types of concepts. We should learn from it and get the word out there. So, thank you. And Cole, recognizing the potential of blockchain and AI, you established Infineo to digitize whole life insurance.
What challenges did you encounter in integrating these technologies into the insurance sector? And how did you address them?
Cole Snell: Yeah, really good question. So why blockchain in my food business? I kind of backed in to some blockchain technology. What I what I was able to do on Ethereum was through QR codes.
And this is again, like 78 years ago, a very long time. I basically put a QR code on, there was some cheese products that I was selling. I put a QR code, the data from the QR code tied the essentially movement of the cheese through the supply chain. And then the Canadian government became interested in this and purchased this from me because what it did is it created a recall process naturally held and ledgered on the blockchain.
So, if someone were to say, eat the piece of cheese and you get Listeria. The Canadian government provided the person scan the QR code. And let’s be honest, QR codes then we’re not as popular as they are now. But the idea was that if the person were to scan the QR code, then the supply chain and the route that that cheese took to get to the, could be traced back and the Listeria outbreak could be say quashed.
So, this was kind of all, you know, good blockchain use case. And so. From that, what I was able to do was look at a use case for blockchain facing real world assets or finance and also based on my work with life insurance. I was able to realize that life insurance is potentially the best possible use case for real world asset tokenization because of all the friction and mostly Brian because of the fact that life insurance is so misunderstood.
I can’t think of a more valuable thing that has a worse reputation. I walk into a room. I talk about blockchain people are fascinated by me. They have questions for me about Bitcoin. They have questions for me about Ethereum. They have questions for me about, well, yeah, I live in Bahamas, and I went through FTX.
They have questions for me about that. I walk into a room, and I talk about life insurance. I clear the room. No one wants to talk to me. They run away. Don’t try and sell me. My cousin, my brother, my aunt, and my mom and dad both tried to sell, all tried to sell me life insurance at some point in their life.
Stay away from me. Unfortunately, it’s just got a terrible reputation. I recognize that I could make life insurance sexy through technology. You could abstract out all of the mistruths. The reason it’s not sexy and the reason it’s misunderstood because it’s a highly, highly profitable industry that is honestly just right with corruption and misinformation.
It’s a highly complicated asset class that is very misrepresented because the amount of commissions that it’s paid. There are massive, massive commissions. It’s to get a license in the life insurance industry. You need about 350 bucks, no high school education, multiple choice. You can fail it three times in a month.
Once you pass, you’re sent out into the world to sell the most highly commissioned, most complicated, misunderstood financial product. In the world, you think we’re going to have problems with that. You think it’s going to attract the wrong type of person or a person that’s unqualified. You think we’re going to attract because of the amount of profit tied to the industry, a bunch of multi-level marketing companies that continue to bastardize the reputation and the value of it.
Absolutely. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The beautiful thing about blockchain technology. Is that you with blockchain, you represent the truth and the truth only once data is ledger, you cannot go back and manipulate or change that data. So, the idea is that you don’t need to trust the truth. And that is what technology brings this asset class.
It reframes it. It not only reframes it in terms of credibility, but what it also does is it allows people to access it in a much more efficient way. If you could imagine. That life insurance has a 4 trillion total addressable market, and it’s the only asset class essentially without a secondary market.
So, people might think, well, there’s got to be regulatory risk tied to that or regulatory reasons why there’s not in 1911 life insurance was deemed property. You can trade it as such. There’s nothing standing in the way, except for massive amounts of friction and push back by the industry for creating a secondary market enter blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology allows, and AI allows these assets to be moved through and regulated way. The primary secondary and into the tertiary market for people to be enjoyed. Basically, what it looks tertiary market is a fixed income alternative with no correlation. And a three sharp ratio. So, for those that look that stuff up, it’s super powerful.
I won’t get into what it all means, but it’s basically blockchain and technology today has arrived to the point where we’re allowed to create a new asset class for leverage. Even the LTV on this stuff is 100 percent sometimes, which is unbelievable. So, you asked me the question, what were some of the challenges?
The challenges are the life insurance industry. They don’t want this to happen. We’ve had three years of pushback from the life insurance industry because they have been the gatekeepers. Of the analog, the only technological innovation in the life insurance industry in the last almost 200 years has been DocuSign.
If you can imagine. And the thing about DocuSign is it was force fed by the consumer to the life insurance industry during COVID because everyone thought they were going to die. Everyone was trying to buy life insurance and FedEx and UPS weren’t working. So, the life insurance industry couldn’t send out packages for wet ink signatures.
They had to acquiesce to DocuSign. Now they run around bragging about all the technological advancements that they’ve made in the last five or so years, which is really DocuSign. And that was just an exercise of greed so they could bring in more premium dollars based on the hysteria and the fear that people thought they were going to die from COVID and them trying to buy life insurance and just products.
So, I hope that answered your question. The friction is huge. It’s absolutely massive. It’s a huge mountain to climb, but we’re doing it because we believe it is the best use case for blockchain technology.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I do appreciate you highlighting some of that stuff. That’s really important. You know, at the end of the day, we want to know that our money is saved and we’re working with somebody trustworthy.
And what I found in blockchain and web three, which this platform is built on, by the way, we embrace it. We love it. We support DeFi. We think that we need to give power back to the people. We need the truth out there. And I love what you’re doing. And this really excites me. It really does. I want to really highlight this podcast when it goes live.
So. Just want to let you know that Cole with the advent of digital assets in evolving financial landscapes, how do you envision the role of whole life insurance changing in the coming years?
Cole Snell: Making it accessible to everyone that, I mean, that’s just, I mean, I love you. You asked me that question. I literally got goosebumps just knowing that this can happen.
We spent two or three years really understanding that trying to understand that this can actually happen and, you know, and how do we, you know, in a, as a startup in a very bootstrapped way, understanding. How wealthy and how archaic the life insurance industry is. I mean, how do you get this asset, this new asset class out there?
How do you democratize whole life insurance specifically? I mean, if you think about whole life insurance, just at it very pragmatically, what really, what is it? Well, it’s, it’s an algorithm at the end of the day. It’s, it’s a mathematical formulation. That allows for leverage, essentially, it’s a trade.
It’s a representation of a trade. Well, what are you trading? What are you leveraging? If you think about what it is, it’s an input of premium dollars into the life expectancy of a human being run through the bells and whistles of whole life insurance policy, risk reserve capital, paid up additions, dividends, and it puts an output out.
Well, the output. It is huge. And the output with, say, a 50 input through the algorithm that I just described, the math and the life expectancy of a human being is the output can be, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars with an input of 50. So that’s a big arbitrage, right? And when you start to really think about what it is that we’re doing right here, whole life insurance is no more than a way to liquidate, leverage and evaluate The most important asset in the world, which is a human life.
That’s really it. I mean, again, back to the first question that you asked me that, or the second question you asked me, I mean, that’s why I wrote the book child millionaire. Well, when do you start valuating a human life? Well, you should be 15 days old legally. You can get life insurance on a child. That’s why I felt a responsibility outside of all this blockchain technology was to inform people that you could create generational wealth.
By pouring capital into the most important asset in your life, which is your children. You can’t argue that you can’t argue that a human life is more important than any art collection. 401k Roth IRA in Canada. If you get Canadian listeners and RSP or retirement savings plan, you can’t argue that a human life is less important than any of those things.
But then the question becomes, well, it’s such an important asset. How do you leverage it, liquidated or evaluated? And the answer is whole life insurance. Transcribed But you got to abstract out all of the pollution, the emotional pollution that comes with the word life insurance and insurance. You have to abstract that out.
We have to look at it in pure economic forms. It’s input premium dollars output, a living benefit and a death benefit. And that’s the unique thing about life insurance and specifically with blockchain technology is it gives you access to that asset class with little to no friction. The key thing, Brian, is the governance of blockchain.
Governance of blockchain is a peer driven governance model. It’s peer to peer. The last thing I thought when I think about a peer, I think about a human being. I think about a human being standing next to me. That’s my peer. A human being is a human life. Well, how do you leverage liquidate or evaluate that human life?
Well, I just described it. It’s the algorithm of life insurance, premium in living benefit and death benefit out. It’s a big arbitrage. So, if we have a peer-to-peer governance model, what we’re able to do is decentralize the entire thinking. Decentralize the risk, decentralize all of the people with their hand in this very lucrative cookie jar, democratize the value of the living benefit.
And I’ll highlight the living benefit. These policies pay back a massive dividend to the policy owners because the risk on these assets is so low and the predictability of the life expectancy of the asset and the scarcity of the asset and the non-fungibility of the asset, which is a human life. Is very, very, very high.
It’s very predictable. We know essentially through all kinds of data when that asset is going to graduate from this earth and expire. So, I digress. But the answer is, is that whole life insurance and a peer-to-peer governance model has an unbelievable opportunity for human beings moving forward to succeed and to be able to put high quality food on the table.
On their table because they’re going to be able to afford it. They’re going to be able to nourish their families and think about how I must feel, Brian, because I’ve been working at this for so long now that we have this new government. We have RFK pushing healthy food. We have the DOGE, like the DOGE is like, I feel like I’m in a simulation right now with what’s happening with the U S government.
And can you think now that I actually have an opportunity to go forward and democratize and disrupt and push this new asset class forward with the support finally of the American government and the American people. It’s pretty darn exciting. And so, and, but it’s people like you that actually interview people like me and push this out and keep the education going.
So, thank you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I’ve got goosebumps because this is what I think the American people and people around the world want is they want freedom. They want, they’re tired of being told that we have to do it one way. And there’s so much corruption and we need to bring blockchain technology in every part of the government.
I believe, and just be transparent. I don’t care what you want to do, what your beliefs are. But let’s keep things, let’s keep the technology in there to help have those bumpers or those guidelines to keep our human nature to, you know, go down that corruption path. So, I appreciate you highlighting all this.
This has been a very fulfilling podcast for me, and I know it will for my guests. And Cole, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Cole Snell: Thanks, Brian. It was a pleasure. Great questions. Keep up the good work.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Cole Snell Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
