Revolutionary Gene Discovery Delays Alzheimer’s Onset by Decades

Plus, do your loved ones know where all your valuables are? Streamlining your estate with a digital vault

Ric Edelman: It's Friday, June 21st. On today's show, a cool discovery just announced in the fight against Alzheimer's. Plus, a conversation with Glenn Shimkus, CEO of Prisidio on how to protect your information with digital vaults. Identity fraud costs Americans more than $50 billion a year, and in my chat with Glenn, which I recorded at our Wealth Management Convergence back in March, he shares how you can protect your content and your clients’ private content from online criminals.

But first I’ve got to ask you, have you checked out the Double VISION videos yet? We recorded all the sessions from my big crypto conference we held earlier this month in Austin. It’s the premier crypto event for financial advisors, RIA firms, and accredited investors. And among the 18 sessions that are now available to you online: the new spot bitcoin ETFs, where I interviewed Matt Hougan, the CIO of Bitwise, Matt Horne, the Head of Digital Asset Strategies for Fidelity and Grant Engelbart of the Carson Group. We also did a session, “Beyond Bitcoin, What's Next for Clients?” with Tony Pecore, who's the SVP and Director of Digital Asset Management for Franklin Templeton. Bill Barhydt, the Founder and CEO of Abra, and Sui Chung, the CEO of CF Benchmarks. Pretty impressive group of people that we had on stage. You get to hear it and see it all as you wish. Just $24.99 gives you access to all 18 of these sessions. And if you're in my CBDA program, it's free. And you get up to 10.5 CE credits, but only through the end of this month, June 30th. The link to learn more and to sign up is in the show notes.

Hey, this is pretty cool news. The story, it's a brand-new announcement this week, but the story actually began in 2019. Back then, researchers discovered that there was a woman living in Colombia. She's got genes that should have caused her to develop Alzheimer's in her 40s, but she didn't. In fact, she didn't get Alzheimer's until she was in her 70s. Now, they just published a study this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Fast forward five years. They have now found 27 members of her extended family, and they all have the same set of genetic propensity as she does, meaning they all should have gotten Alzheimer's in their 40s, but none of them got the disease as quickly as they were expected to get it. The study says that this created clues that allowed the researchers to develop a drug. The goal is for it to do what these folks’ bodies are doing naturally - stave off Alzheimer's. The publication says the researchers have developed an experimental drug. It seems to have already worked in mice, but it's early. But it's encouraging, so stay tuned for more on this. I'll keep you posted. There is no question that we are going to be seeing big advances in the fight against Alzheimer's over the next several years.

Coming up next: protecting your information with Glenn Shimkus, CEO of Prisidio. Stay with us for more here on The Truth About Your Future.

Thanks for staying with us here on The Truth About Your Future. The following interview is with Glenn Shimkus, the CEO of Prisidio, from my Wealth Management Convergence conference back in March.

Ric Edelman: Let me introduce now our next session. Glenn Shimkus. He is the CEO of Prisidio, and we're gonna be talking about protecting clients from crime using digital vaults. Glenn, please join us. Welcome, Glenn Shimkus.

Thanks for doing this, Glenn.

Glenn Shimkus: Thank you.

Ric Edelman: So, life has gotten so much more complicated. I was talking with an advisor here today, this morning who shared with me a story of a client he's currently dealing with who is in the process of being scammed, in a crypto scam, and he's currently trying to persuade the client not to do what the client wants to go do because the advisor clearly sees that this client is being scammed and the client is not yet willing to admit or agree that the scam is underway.

Last night at dinner, an advisor was telling me the saga of how he prevented a client from getting scammed, and it took months, including involvement by Schwab's fraud division, to persuade the client to realize that they were, in fact, being scammed. Life has not only gotten more complicated, our obligations have grew and become more complex, where it's no longer enough that we are helping our clients grow their assets, achieve their financial goals, answer their fundamental questions about money. It's now gotten to the point where we have to protect our clients from the risks that exist in the world because life has just become so dangerous, and we now see the advent of AI and deep fakes and the incredible digital frauds that exist, in all respects. And a combination of a new way that you can serve clients and give them a benefit they currently don't have, while simultaneously protecting them from the online crime that exists.

And that's why we've asked Glenn to chat with us here today during this lunch session. So welcome Glenn, to this conversation. The first thing I want you to explain to everybody because I don't think they're necessarily familiar: what is Prisidio?

Glenn Shimkus: So, thank you for allowing me to be here and being part of this great conversation. And quite frankly, it's been enjoyable listening to these conversations about aging population, about estate planning and preparing for end of life, even bitcoin and crypto holdings, but Prisidio is a purpose-built digital vault, highly secure. It's built for families and individuals to pull together: what do you have of value? Where do you have documents, information, valuables? Who is important in your life – like your wealth advisor, your estate attorney, along with your most important documents related to identity, trust and estate, and holdings? And we bring that all together, allow you to securely share that with family members, advisors, and most importantly, make sure it's successfully transitioned eventually upon your passing.

Ric Edelman: That sounds a little grandiose. It sounds pretty innovative, dealing with digital documentation, essentially. People might question, why are you doing this and what confidence can people have that you might have any semblance of knowing what you're talking about. It might be helpful for people to know your background, there's a company that people may or may not have ever heard of that they use on a daily basis for the digital distribution of documents. What's the name of that company?

Glenn Shimkus: DocuSign.

Ric Edelman: You were the guy who built DocuSign.

Glenn Shimkus: So, I've spent my entire career helping corporations, global corporations, manage documents and information, right? It's a key asset of just about every organization on this planet. Well, I had my last company that I founded was in the real estate space, helping with residential transactions, and I came across this company very early called DocuSign back in 2009, about 50 employees. And certainly one component of a real estate transaction, and any transaction quite frankly, is getting something signed securely, making sure you know who is doing the signing. And I ended up partnering with them very closely and became a very key partner, did things with DocuSign that had never been done in the world. And, ended up being approached by Adobe, Zillow, DocuSign, and ended up selling my company to DocuSign as their first acquisition. And then helped them grow from a very small company, and I left right before they became public to start working on Prisidio.

Ric Edelman: So, you know what you're talking about in the document creation, storage, distribution space. DocuSign is simply, if we can put that in quotes, a company that facilitates the signing and transmittal of a contract, essentially. But you recognize that that's the very beginning of what people's interaction with documents really is, so Prisidio you've created to serve as a digital vault. Talk about what that is.

Glenn Shimkus: I ask people, so, not to bring everyone down over lunch, but I have four friends that lost a loved one last year. I live in Naples, Florida, a nice little truck across Alligator Alley, and I've been there for six years, and I've had to evacuate twice: once for this visitor called Ian, Hurricane Ian, but I also had to evacuate for a wildfire, which people go in Florida, “you had to evacuate for a wildfire?” And I did, and there's all these things happening, and I ask, if you know someone that lost a loved one, what happens is the person who's left behind becomes an archaeologist, and they have to track down everything and piece that person's world together.

Fifty years ago, for our grandparents, it was easier. You go to their house, that's the dig site. That's where you find the business card or their banker. You find the insurance statement. You find that they've got a bank account at Bank of America or Chase or whomever. But you were able to pull this stuff together, right? You were able to piece it together. Today, everything is everywhere. Think about your own world. How do you know, how would someone know if you have a life insurance policy? Do you have a will? Oh, and by the way, if you have a will, guess what? You need to know where the original is stored. Do you have a safety deposit box? Storage unit? February 1st, National Unclaimed Property Day in the U. S.: $70 billion is being held at the state level. About $4-$5 billion is being claimed of that, and the amount is growing.

We talked about crypto this morning and bitcoin. If you look right now, you'll see that it's estimated that about 15-18%, as high as 30%, of bitcoin that's been mined is lost. Some of it, yes, someone lost a drive, the encryption key, but guess what? Someone passed away and they had crypto. I have a Coinbase account. I've had Ethereum and bitcoin for years. If something happened to me, and someone went to my wife and said, did Glenn have cryptocurrency? Her reaction would be: no. She doesn't know that term. If they said bitcoin, she'd go, yeah, yeah, I think we had that. And then the next question: where, right? So, these are the types of things we all need to be prepared with.

We're an aging population. We're at the start of the largest wealth transfer in history. And we are seeing more frequent and severe natural disasters than ever. And so these are the types of things that we're trying to do with Prisidio. And yes, it is a bit aspirational, but we're also seeing really good pickup and adoption because people are realizing more and more people are moving on the spectrum from: yeah, I should do that to I know I need to do that.

Ric Edelman: So, when you say natural disasters, your premise is simply that the house literally gets knocked down, burned down, flooded out, and the documents in the house are destroyed.

Glenn Shimkus: Absolutely, the documents, the property. If someone came to me, if my property had some minor damage, and it had landscaping damage, but if something had happened to my structure, I have to prove that I have artwork. I have to prove that all these things exist in my house. I literally walk around, and I take a picture of every room in my house through Prisidio and add it to my place. I take a video of every floor. When I buy something, I take a picture of the receipt, take a picture of the item, and that's what we're trying to do is help bring all that together because it was great from my perspective. Now I hope that doesn't come across wrong, but watching the news after Hurricane Ian, you literally saw baggies of important documents floating around or stuck in different places because it's not just natural disasters: fires, thefts, and by the way, we think of natural disaster, we're in Florida, right? Hurricane season starting, but floods, wildfires, tornadoes, mudslides, all of these things are happening all over the U. S. at greater frequency than ever.

Ric Edelman: There are other companies that provide document storage facilities. Is Prisidio just the latest player in that space, or is it something different that you're doing?

Glenn Shimkus: Fundamentally I believe we're doing something different, right? I've spent my entire career, I consider myself a document management nerd, which, my wife says I gotta stop saying that. But I am, and so I'm going to make a bold statement: I think we do things with sharing that nobody else in the world can do, is doing or can do, because we've got international patent applications filed on it. Think about this from your own perspective for a moment: this is your most important, personal, sensitive information and documentation. I think you want to know who you are sharing it with, did they look at it, what else do they have access to? With Prisidio, you are always in control. You can invite people into your vault for free, forever free. You can decide what each person you invite can see and do. Can they add? Can they edit? Can they delete? But here's where it gets complicated and convoluted with what's out there today: if the more you have in a Dropbox or a Google Drive, great solutions, but the more you have in there, you cannot answer the question, what do they have access to, did they look at it, what else do they have access to? We're the only solution in the world where I can go to Ric, my wealth advisor, and see exactly what Ric has access to, what Ric can do, and know what Ric has done down to the point if Ric was in my vault today, I would get a real time text notification on my phone that says, “Ric accessed your vault from West Palm Beach, United States.” And if I was sitting here, and I'm in an important meeting right now, and I'm like, “gosh, I don't have time to deal with this, but Ric, I haven't talked to him in a year, so what's he doing in my vault?” Or it says, “Ric accessed your vault from Dubai, and gosh, Ric, you've never mentioned Dubai to me.” And if you are on vacation, why are you in my vault? In one click, I can temporarily block his access until I have time to say, “okay, Ric, you in Dubai? Or what does Ric have access to? I should look.”

So, I think sharing is fundamental, but it's not just sharing today. We have something called a key holder: you can determine today who you want to have full, view-only access to your vault upon your passing, and we have a legal review process, death certificate, signed affidavit to validate the vault owner's passed, and then make sure everything you've put in there is successfully transitioned.

Ric Edelman: So, when you talk about giving people access, you mentioned a wealth advisor, I would add, I would assume a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant to those lists as well.

Glenn Shimkus: Absolutely.

Ric Edelman: And how about family members?

Glenn Shimkus: Of course, absolutely family members. And part of the benefit is bringing people in is not just controlling what they can see and securely sharing, right? Because think about how we share our most important information. Anyone here refinance or purchase a property in the last year or two? Think about all the important, sensitive information you have to get to someone else. And how do we do that most of the time? We send an email, right? That's your most important information.

Ric Edelman: It's least secure.

Glenn Shimkus: And it's the least secure way of doing so, and that's why when we talk about crime, identity theft happens every 14 seconds. And yes, there's a lot of different reasons. Someone was recently telling me, when they were buying a car in Indiana, and I don't know all the details, but they said the auto dealer needed their social security number and said, “oh, just text it to me.” And they're like, “are you kidding me?” But that's what we're talking about. We share our most important information and documents via text and email because it's the easiest way for me to get to you. But we all have a lot of people in our world: family members, spouses, parents, wealth advisor, insurance agent, CPA, attorney, and the list goes on, and everybody needs some of our information at some point in time.

Ric Edelman: So, is it just the legal documents? I can imagine there's a lot of them: our financial statements, our brokerage accounts, our will and trust and tax returns. Is that it that you're putting into the digital vault? Is there anything else that people can or should be adding?

Glenn Shimkus: Yeah, so we provide you the capability: we say it's people, places, and things in addition to documents. Now let me explain what that means. People: who's important in your world, that know something about you, about what you have, or where you have it, or will need to if there's an emergency or upon your passing? It could be a spouse, a child, a parent, but it also could be wealth advisor, insurance agent, primary care physician.

Places is so overlooked: it's where do you have original documents, where do you have information, and where do you have your valuables, right? One of the number one things that is in unclaimed property: safety deposit boxes. People don't know they had them, right? And someone passes away and it's there. So that's places. Places can be offline, like the storage unit or safety deposit box, but it could be Coinbase. In mine, a place is Coinbase, right? That's where I have my crypto wallet.

And then the last area is things. When we intentionally say things, it's what do you have of value? What's of value to you? Because yes, it could be an insurance policy, stockholding, crypto, a house, a boat, a watch. But it also could be in my dad's vault, true story, he has a hope chest, he's got a picture of it. And my dad's added that, and he says it's the most important asset he has. Well, not only does he have a picture of it, but he's got videos in Prisidio of him sitting next to it. Well, that hope chest is the only physical connection my dad has to his mom. When he entered this world, that day, she passed away. That is the only thing. And so, not only has he identified that in Prisidio, but he has videos of him, his words, his emotion, telling the story of the hope chest: his mom, walking through and showing us his mom's wedding ring, and so it's that value as we try and bring together all of these important items for our subscribers.

Ric Edelman: So, the key element is the uploading of the data and the maintenance of the data, and that can be a bit of a chore. So, who's, I would assume that you're, by giving your lawyer permission, you're also giving them permission to upload the legal documents into your vault, not merely read.

Glenn Shimkus: That's correct. Yeah.

Ric Edelman: But your dad's video of the hope chest requires your dad to do this. When you took photos of your house. And everything in it you had to go to the effort of uploading that data.

Glenn Shimkus: That's right.

Ric Edelman: Are people willing to go through that, to do that work and to engage in that activity?

Glenn Shimkus: If you make it easy, and if you show a value proposition. What I say is, “listen this work will have to get done. That's it. It will. It's either you today and chunk it up, right?” I don't want anyone to have to worry about like I'm in the midst of binge-watching Suits with my wife. We've just finished season five, so I can't wait to see what happens in season six.

Ric Edelman: Is everybody watching this thing? My wife is, like, all over this, and I haven't, it's, I haven't seen it yet.

Glenn Shimkus: It's amazing.

But you don't have to give up doing these things, because what I want to make sure you can do is if you're in your closet when you get home and you see your safe, and you go, “I should add that as a place to Prisidio.” Our phone's with us an embarrassing amount of time. Grab your phone, go to Prisidio, click add, take a picture of it, share it, if you want to, put your phone down, keep doing what you're doing. So, we want to make it easy.

Ric Edelman: It just takes moments.

Glenn Shimkus: Absolutely.

Ric Edelman: It's easier than uploading a TikTok.

Glenn Shimkus: And that's the key, right? And then you can invite people in and say, “my estate attorney is in Dallas, he's out in Foley, and I permissioned him to add. He can't edit. He can't delete. I control what he can see.” But when we redid all off our estate, we've got five trusts, and I'm glad I heard I've got a slat for myself and my wife. So, I was glad that I've gotten good advice, but I permissioned him to add it, so I don't have to. But here's the best part: you're gonna see an announcement at DocuSign's annual conference.

We also have a strategy, it's called Nobody Does the Work, right? So, think about your own worlds with your clients. When they're signing something via DocuSign, it's pretty important. You're literally gonna be able to drag us into your workflow for DocuSign one time, no code, no engineering, and anything your client signs can get automatically archived to their Prisidio vault. So, the company doesn't do the work, the advisor doesn't do the work, and Prisidio doesn't do the work, and most importantly, the client doesn't do the work.

Ric Edelman: Just happens like that?

Glenn Shimkus: Just happens.

Ric Edelman: By that notion, is the product that you're selling a B2C product or a B2B product?

Glenn Shimkus: It's for the consumer, but I learned a really important lesson: I had over 10 years’ experience at DocuSign, again, under, 50 employees to about 4,000 before they went public. And here's what I learned from DocuSign: I have the same problem that they had 15 years ago. And if Ric, you're buying a house, and I said 15 years ago, “okay, I'm going to go home, and you're going to get an email from DocuSign, and I want you to go on your computer and type in your name.” You're like, “okay, hold on, right? Stop, stop, stop, stop. Who are they? What is this? Is it legal? Is my bank going to accept it?” And they had two challenges: one is what I would say is the brand new product category, eSignature. And then it was this unknown brand where trust is important. And so, what they did is they went through businesses and their first real inflection point was they signed a partnership with the National Association of Real Estate, they owned real estate, and then so many people got to know them. Well, with Prisidio, it's the same thing. “Who are you? How do we entrust our information to you?”

We're finalizing an incredibly strategic deal with AARP. Back to the question, we're going B2B2C because going to consumers’ heart, it's expensive. This is all about trust. So, we're working through partners like DocuSign, AARP is an investor, the National Association of Realtors is an investor, and so we're going through those trusted channels where, because AARP puts their logo on my product, will everybody trust it? No. But will a lot more people trust it because they know they vetted us and put us through the ringer the last year and a half? Absolutely.

Ric Edelman: So, talk about the application for advisors. How would advisors engage with you?

Glenn Shimkus: Well, twofold: we're at the start of the largest wealth transfer in history, and we know this 50+ audience has $70, $80 trillion in assets, and so we're always exchanging information back and forth. And so Prisidio provides you a secure channel to not just store a couple of key documents, but they can turn on and say, “oh yeah, I have a Coinbase account, or I have bitcoin,” and they can literally share it with you so you can see it if they desire.

For the advisor, it's a secure way to communicate, but it's also a way for you to be able to invest in the future of that relationship beyond that client, because these assets are going to go to the children, likely, maybe, as you pointed out, they may be going to the children, and it's an opportunity to get involved with those children. And more and more people, they expect this technology, they want this. And so this makes it easier for one to be able to work with their advisor and to ensure that there's nothing being emailed back and forth that has account numbers, social security numbers. All of it is highly secure, controlled and protected.

Ric Edelman: What's the pricing like?

Glenn Shimkus: So, pricing off the web for one person to sign up is $120 a year or $12 a month. And then we also have, what we're doing for AARP is we're creating what we're calling an essentials or lightweight, still a lot of the same functionality, but the price point for that will be around $25 a year. And it gets people going, it gets you started. And again, the key is: do a little bit. What I tell people, I do two-minute tips on video, every week. If you give me two, three, four, five minutes twice a month, I guarantee you within six months, you are going to be so much better off, not just for you, but your family and your loved ones.

Ric Edelman: So, this strikes me as an easy value add that advisors can offer their clients, and I assume that from the B2B level, there's enterprise pricing and so on.

Glenn Shimkus: Absolutely. Yeah.

Ric Edelman: So, the big issue though, in all of tech, regardless of the functionality, the service provided, the benefit obtained, the big thing that freaks everybody out, where the due diligence process spends most of its time is on security. How safe is the data? How protected is it? Privacy, etc. How have you addressed all that?

Glenn Shimkus: Great question. First of all, it all starts with the team. My chief architect and of technology worked at the NSA equivalent in the United Kingdom, and his job truly was to protect country assets that ranged from tax filings to nuclear launch codes. The chief information security officer who built DocuSign from startup to public company’s on my board of directors and an investor. I have a very active investor who's a member of the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame. We require multi-factor or two-factor authentication. We are SOC 2 Type 2. We are days away from announcing HIPAA compliance, as well. We even have, there's a U.S. federal agency that helps national infrastructure protect against cyber-attacks. It's called CISA. Because of the relationships we have and what we're doing, they work with water treatment facilities, nuclear power plants to protect against cyber-attacks. We actually have been working with them for a year and a half. They scan our environment, give us feedback, and even try and attack our environment, every single month. Security and privacy – and by the way, head of privacy at PayPal, she's an investor as well.

Ric Edelman: So, as we're trying to find opportunities to provide value add to our clients, differentiate, provide and deliver new products and services, the notion of digital vaults is something that is really worth consideration. That's Glenn Shimkus, the CEO of Prisidio. Glenn, thank you so much for sharing this info today.

Glenn Shimkus: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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