Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works,

how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein.

Today is episode 535. It's titled Six Principles for Thriving Under Uncertainty. And how big tech is doing

the exact opposite. I recently took over 16,000 words

of transcripts from this podcast. These were episodes released over the past two and a half

years, select episodes, and I asked Chat GPT5 to distill them into core principles.

They should be familiar to you if you're a longtime listener of the podcast

because these are the principles I use to navigate my life and manage risk.

In the context of that, when I think about how big tech is building out AI, in some ways, these firms are

violating all of these core principles. And so it makes for a pretty fascinating contrast to

compare, well, here's a principle, but here's what big tech is doing, and this is why they're doing it.

So let's get started with principle number one.

Protect the foundation. I have couched this in the past as avoid ruin, avoid catastrophic loss,

so we can continue, we can stay in the game. We do that by building buffers of savings,

building inventories of skills, developing multiple

streams of income using a variety of return drivers in our investment portfolio.

An important aspect of protecting the foundation is to recognize what matters is exposure.

What's our capacity to absorb losses, which is different from

loss aversion, wanting to avoid all loss because it feels bad. What matters is what are the

consequences of losses? Will it ruin us? Now, some examples recently that in my life, where I've applied this principle is

in our business. As we build out asset camp, we have taken measures to reduce our use of cash so that we can

continue longer as we build out this investment tool for advisors. I have a variety

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