Productivity Is Just Tablestakes: AI Expert Allie K. Miller on How to Use AI To Build Wealth

22:31So it's looking at this tradeoff and realizing that the floor of how businesses are run in 2026 and beyond has been raised. And so it is kind of.

22:42Nicole Lapin:Because everybody's doing it. So, yeah. And, you know, I spend money on DocuSign. I spend money on more Google storage. I spend money on devices. I spend money on. Hosting. Yeah. Everything. And so all these things, some of them are more expensive than my AI situation. I know lately I've been thinking about that. This is the digital version of going to Target where. So I go to Target and I think everything's inexpensive. So we're going shopping. Not if you buy the amount that I buy. And that's what happens. And then I see the anthropic charges and everything that's come up. And I'm like, OK, you know, AI agent here, AI thing here or whatever for video or whatever for this.

23:26Nicole Lapin:And at the end, I'm like checking out at Target with a$300 cart when I thought I was coming in for Oreos and face wash. It happens hopefully less in the AI world because it's that one flat subscription. And I would hope that most people aren't going nuts like Uber on API costs. But yeah, what I would want people to feel is like a sense of abundance with these AI systems. And that's like a very Silicon Valley word. But so many business users of these AI systems, they're using the free tier or they're using the$20 subscription tier. And they're not doing things that make their business more money.

24:09Like I've said this a thousand times. Productivity is a trap, right? If we only go after productivity, if we only try and do things faster, your business is not going to make that much more money. And so you won't be able to justify the spend really of any of these AI systems, particularly if you're giving the best AI systems to every single person on your team. So what is going to make you more money? The thing that makes you more money is looking at what business lines you run, how you're actually running this, and actually working toward reinvention and transformation. So I created a prompt to allow people to do this.

24:42And the basics of it is asking AI to interview you in depth, like I'm talking 20 minute back and forth interview on who you are, what you're running, and to work backwards from artifacts and outcomes. So if every single month I like every single month I send my my clients a client recap of what is happening in the world of AI, maybe that still makes sense as an artifact. But if I'm sending a research report on AI, let's say, let's say that I send AI research reports to every single client every month. The only reason I'm sending those research reports is so that they can make better decisions, right, that they can make better organizational structure decisions or procurement decisions or whatever.

25:22I'm doing something that helps them do something. Right? Generic ads. What if I just expanded my business to literally help them with the something? What if I used AI to build out a platform that allowed me to jump on calls with clients and in live mode, figure out how to solve their problems? And underneath it all has that AI research. Suddenly, instead of giving them the AI research for free or for an extra four digits, I can upsell and now it's an additional five or six digit business. So I have this prompt that basically works backwards, engineers backwards from what business are you actually running?

26:02And by that, I mean, what value are you providing to the world? The way you have provided it, the process by which you've provided it. Most businesses have not changed their process since 2019. They're just doing what they do faster. And it makes me depressed, like doubled over with depression, seeing that people are just doing small things in their business faster. And so I actually think really a bad piece of advice is to look at your day and to look at a task and to give that task to AI. That is what every other person is going to tell you to do an AI. And I'm here to tell you that is bad advice in 2026.

26:41Nicole Lapin:So what's better advice? Better advice is to work backwards from that transformation. Like I think that right now, and this is particularly for finance and gaining new leverage, right? Like I want people to view AI not as a tool, but as leverage. And so that means reinventing those workflows, maybe establishing new business lines. And that means probably going to an AI system, having it interview you, having it really deeply understand your business, what outcomes you drive, who you drive them for, who do you serve, who do you not serve, what are your business strengths, what are your weaknesses, what resources do you have, how many people do you have, how long have you been in business?

27:19All of these answers I want my AI system to have because I want it to reinvent and brainstorm with me on my behalf and to be this dreamer and to be this weird whimsical reinvention layer so that I'm not running the same business in 2026 that I am in 2019. And by the way, my clients are going to be that much happier because they're going to go, oh, my God, we didn't have time to reinvent our business. Thank you for stepping ahead and being the person who's running a startup or a smaller team that can do this, that can sprint ahead. Like individuals or small, medium businesses or entrepreneurs, they have more time to be able to sprint on a larger client's behalf.

28:00Nicole Lapin:I mean, I find the interview process quite elucidating myself. Like, I find it very interesting because it forces me to think about those questions in a way are you taping are you dictating how are you doing it i'm i'm doing a little bit of both yeah i switch on and off good depending on where i am also yeah like if i'm in public i'm not if i'm in public i'm talking to ai really oh my god all the time i'm going on walks i start my mornings with ai i'm talking back and forth with it sometimes i'll just like uh even this was last week but my friend and i were having a conversation and both of us were like wait a second are we saying smart things Should we have AI be recording this?

28:35So we opened up Otter. We recapped the conversation thus far. It took like, you know, three minutes to recap. And then we just had to record our entire conversation. That became content. That became edits to our, you know, the way that we send client proposals. That became context. Like I'm constantly building up context.

28:52Nicole Lapin:So what guardrails should you keep in mind when giving context around your wealth? And how should you leverage AI to grow wealth? To be clear, I think there are going to be some people who just never share personal finance information with these AI systems. And if that is the decision you want to take, by all means, go for it. But you should still leverage these AI systems to understand new topics, to better understand how interest rates may impact your system, to understand how the Fed works. Like I went crazy deep with AI systems to understand the Fed. I understood that like more. Oh, my God.

29:29Cleveland as a as a hub for the Fed, like as a region has more leverage than San Francisco does for the whole West Coast. That like Cleveland votes every two cycles. San Francisco votes every three. Maybe that doesn't change crazy things about my business, but all of that, it's it's leveraging it as a tutor. But that's a generic topic. And yet it might change the way that I run my business. And the average person is not doing that.

29:54Nicole Lapin:Totally. But sister, you were just on Mel Robbins' show and she had a bunch of controversy about telling people to upload their financial documents. Do you agree? I think there are going to be some people who do and some people who don't. I think the biggest thing that I would want every single person to hear is it is up to you. But in the absence of sharing this really deep personal data, whether that's health care, whether that's finance, whether that's family, friends, there's a spectrum of this. You can still gain leverage from it. That's really what I'm trying to say. I do think that locally run AI, which a lot of these videos, they're mostly talking about AI lab platforms like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft.

30:35If you're running things locally, it is only sitting on your laptop. So I hesitate telling people, don't put any of this data in because there are smart, safe ways of doing it. And I would hate if half the population, and particularly women from these videos, if they're not getting that value because they're worried or because they don't trust the AI labs, which again, I totally understand. But if you spin up, it's a product called LM Studio. There's a bunch of others. I have no relationship with them. But if you download something called LM Studio, you can download open source models. You run the whole freaking thing on your laptop.

31:10That is it. It doesn't go anywhere. You can upload as many documents as you want. You can delete the things after. There's no retention. It's on your computer. And so I think we as a society are in my mind, and this is going to be a hot take, but I think we are so quick to react negatively to finance advice, to health care advice, to anything that we're seeing on social media. And I want more people to take a step back and to understand how these systems at least work, because maybe there is a safer route, a more private route, a local route that's only run on your devices, because that still allows you to gain that power, that leverage, that ability to build wealth or knowledge and gain that for your life or your business.

31:55And I don't want people to lose that. So Mel wasn't wrong. It depends on what product you're talking about. I think telling a group of people that they have to do something is a recipe for people to have their back against a wall. And so anytime that I'm educating, again, millions of people in an enterprise, I am first and foremost working from a viewpoint of flexibility and working from a viewpoint of fear. Like I know that I talk to millions of people. 80 % of them are worried about their job. They're worried about their career. They're worried about their future. And so I'm really not going to get out there and say, every single person, you have to put in this exact prompt with this exact data on this exact product.

32:41I want to give people the option, the choice, because AI is such this horizontal, flexible accelerator that it's important to be able to use it in the way you want to use it. So net net, it depends. Yeah. I mean, and that's the easy answer to everything. But in the same way that if I came to you and said, so should I put all of my money into mutual funds? You would probably say it depends. I have a lot of questions about it. Yeah.

33:09Nicole Lapin:But I think that's the danger, right? If you're putting something on social media and some of it is OK advice to use the headline to use AI to help with finance. Yes. Cosign on that. I think you don't have a lot of room for the asterisks and the personal type of advice that everybody's going to need. And by the way, I feel for every single person who's hearing this really black and white advice because we're all running crazy busy lives and we only have five minutes in our day to carve out for these things. And so we're naturally going to only hear this really narrow piece of advice. And so it really does take carving out a few hours to maybe better understand how these work or better understand what options we have outside of AI labs or cloud providers, even if the tech is a little bit behind.

34:01Right. I'm not saying it's the most state of the art, but you can still make that trade off.

34:06Nicole Lapin:So if you're doing brokerage bank statements, put it on local toggle off. At the very least. Yeah. If again, risk postures are a spectrum. If you are the most risk-averse person out there, then you're probably never going to put finance data into any of these systems. If you're extremely risk-averse, but you're open to seeing what AI could do, run it locally, run it on something like LM Studio, use an open source model like GPT, OSS. There's a bunch of options. Upload the document. You're not going to be able to browse the internet. You're not going to be able to do cloud-like things, but you're going to be able to get some help.

34:46And then as you move up from there, you're going to maybe try temporary chats inside of a cloud provider. As you go up from there, you're going to just use traditional chat, right? Some people are even going to build their own systems, but you always have to ask yourself, what leverage am I giving away? What leverage am I giving back? And I do the exact same thing for finance. I do the exact same thing for healthcare. I love your content.

35:10Nicole Lapin:Full stop. Specifically around kids and AI, though. I am a new mom. I have an 18-month-old daughter. I think about this a lot. My husband is in the AI world. We think about safeguards. We think about opportunities. And you said something so, so brilliant, chef's kiss, many, many times over, that AI scams are the new white vans. Tell me why. I should say I'm not a mother. And so actually for that newsletter, we ran it by 15 parents because we were getting ahead of these fears, right? Wanting to make sure that we covered it. And so in that newsletter, it was the most shared newsletter I have ever shared because I think so many people are worried about their kids.

35:52So one of the nine pieces of advice that we gave was to educate your kids on the types of AI scams that exist. And so that might be deep fakes, right? People creating fake videos of you giving fake financial advice. And we're seeing this from celebrities, from influencers. It's already happening. I also think that there's a lot of like executive mimicking, a fancy phishing attack where it's more like social engineering. So they'll pretend that they are the CFO. They'll call someone two rungs below the CFO and say, I need you to wire$50 million to this client. If they don't get it, they're going to fire us.

36:33I need you to do this right now. And they're able to mimic the voice. They're able to spoof the email address. they're able to do that. And because they're creating urgency and because they appear to be real, lifelike, whatever, they're going to more likely get the thing that they want. So there's a lot of flavors of AI scams. Clearly, every single person should have some sort of like password. Safe word. We have a safe word. Don't say it on this podcast.

36:58Nicole Lapin:Definitely. I'm not saying it. Honestly, I don't even remember at this point. We need to revisit the safe word conversation. Do you recommend that? Yeah. Listen, every the best security protocols are multilayer. So I would have a password between you and your family that is never written down. I would have a few questions in the back of your mind, kind of like when the bank asked, like, what was your high school mascot? But ask questions that you know that only your family can answer again and has not been written down or posted on social media. I would be setting up protocols like turning off data sharing.

37:31Right. I would be thinking about a multi-layered approach. One password doesn't save even your login into whatever accounts you're doing, right? We do two-factor authentication even for the most basic logins into like our airline websites. So why would that be any different for the way that you treat your family? I mean it shouldn't be so Harry Mack who's like my favorite one of my favorite freestyle rappers when he asks people like give me any word he always says don't make it a food or an animal like just are the default human brain okay so when you're thinking about your safe word with

38:06Nicole Lapin:your family don't do animal who cares like just don't do a fruit I would say don't do don't do a fruit or an animal that just because that our brains are wired for whatever reason like every single person's safe word is pineapple and the it's like putting in your password and making your password password one two three like just don't do it it's it's a strange pattern humans are weird I don't know if you know that so weird yeah the weirdest okay so this comes into play if god forbid you get called by somebody that you think is a family member it sounds like your family member. It might even come from their number.

38:44Nicole Lapin:Yeah. Which, by the way, these are not weird, crazy stories where I'm hearing it from a friend of my friend. This literally happened to her. What happened? It was in a business context and it was them spoofing the executive saying, I need you to wire this money. And so in addition to the password and the asking of the questions, one of the best things you can do is hang up on whatever thing you just got called on or email or whatever and ping the person back on a different medium or the same medium, but you're initiating it. So if someone, if your mom calls you, hang up, call your mom back. If your CFO or your boss emails you, go and walk over to their desk or email them or call them or whatever.

39:26Like assume that anything with extreme urgency and high liability is a scam. Like we almost have to default to assuming that things are AI generated. And that might be content. That might be whatever. But like that's why it's trust but verify. Like we wanted to get you something that had your initials on it. I asked a whole bunch of AI systems like what is her middle freaking name? And we have not talked before this, right? According to AI, your middle initial is M. Is that right? Okay. But I didn't know it enough and I couldn't verify it. So I didn't put the middle initial onto the thing. Is it ****?

40:07It's ****. Yeah, go AI. Get out of here, AI. You didn't cut that out, but yeah. Yeah.

40:13Nicole Lapin:Wow. Yeah, but I didn't have a way to verify it. I never, ever use that. Somewhere it exists. What the heck? But this is also, I mean, it's interesting, right? Like AI can find needles in a haystack. Like AI makes it so much easier to find that one random tweet you wrote in 2015 or that one random photo you took in college. and like the one random important strategy document that you wrote in your business. And so if I'm thinking about how to prevent AI scams, I have to remember how these systems work. And I have to remember that it's really, really good at finding a needle in a haystack. So all of the assumptions that we had of how people could find information on the internet, they are now wrong.

41:01This idea that like, oh, no one could ever find that about me. If it exists on a website that AI can scrape, it's a whole lot easier to find that.

41:09Nicole Lapin:Okay. Something else that you talked about with kids and AI that really resonated with me was around how to safeguard or think about the loneliness and the social anxiety component of having almost like a parasocial relationship with a chatbot. Yeah. How do you think about that? I love that you say talk to, use your voice a little bit more too than just text. Yeah. What else? So can I tell you a story? I met a woman in New York. She's around 40. She's raising her daughter. She's about 10. And she's specifically raising her daughter to be a 90s kid. So she... Lo-fi. Yeah. Yeah. Dumb phone. Yes.

41:52So she she has her kid. The only thing on her phone is that it is a phone so she can call.

41:59Nicole Lapin:It's a Nokia flip phone situation. It could be. But she basically has bricked all the other apps out. So there's no Uber or there's no Spotify, whatever. And so she has told her daughter, if you want to make plans with someone, you have to call them. You can't text or if you're going to hang out with them, you can't hang out with your phones or even the movies. that she's watching the types of movies they're from the 90s and a few you know new ones but is she watching at what's happening i think that's 84 i gotta look up on etfs but just like slower paced things like i think that there's uh instagram accounts that celebrate the 90s that are coming back our clothing and trends in fashion 90s are coming back i talked to a friend who runs like an in-person event planning business, it is skyrocketing, right?

42:49Humans want real connection. We want to reach, yes, E.T. We want to be with people. And so if I were a parent, and I've talked to so many parents about this, find ways of making sure your child has in-person interactions with you, with other parents, right? Socializing them out, interactions with other kids, just more variety and more exposure, I think, is so important because they should know that the alternative is this beautiful human connection. It is in the absence of that, that I think a lot of people might go to something like an AI chatbot.

43:28Nicole Lapin:I love the idea of living in the 90s in theory, but then I fast forward and I think, well, if her friends are going to have smartphones and she doesn't, you know, what's the implications of that? She's going to hate me. I need to then maybe find her or, you know, practically get a hold of her or use an app or something like that. And so in theory, I love this idea, but does it work in practice? So I can only, you know, relay back the examples that I've heard that are anecdotal. My cousins also do this. And I think the big thing is that they're looking at tradeoffs. And so if there was a safety issue, I'm sure and I'm pretty sure that all of them have the location turned on where the parent can see.

44:14So that's certainly one big help. Maybe some of them allow for things like Uber, but they're probably blocking social media apps and the tradeoff might not be there for those.

44:27Nicole Lapin:how old should a kid be before they start using chat gbtr clod it's like what do you out of curiosity like what does your gut say 35

44:40it's it's so interesting like there are some countries that are that are setting age limits right or age requirements and what's that on systems like australia is set a 16 plus um we have rules that you can't use social media until you're 13 plus like all these systems are supposed to have age verification. And in fact, the AI labs have shared that there are trends in how children under 13 use these systems where it's easier to parse out who is under 13.

45:12Nicole Lapin:I thought that was really interesting. I heard Dario from Anthropic talk about that. And I believed him. Yeah. Because it can pick up on even if you're trying to trick the AI to ask about like older people questions like you know what do what do people do when they're 35 or whatever like it knows that that's us and again it's because ai is gathering many different prompts like figuring out whether something is ai generated in one sentence very hard if you give me 80 000 pages and then i have to determine whether it's ai generated or not a whole lot easier and so because you get more data points.

45:50Like if you, it's like easier to triangulate. You start to see patterns over a long horizon. And so if, you know, like in AI generated content where we hear a thousand times, it's not X, it's Y, or like, here's the thing. We get this because we've seen it over patterns. But if someone's never seen AI generated content and they hear it once, they go, oh, that's such great, powerful sentence. So these systems over time are better at figuring out whether someone is in this generation or that generation. But the difference between what this or that. Oh, yeah. But the ability to figure out whether they're 12 and a half or 13 is obviously a lot harder because it's more narrow.

46:30So what do you think the age limit should be? It is not. Yeah, but but I am the person who's also telling people it is up to you. Like there are some eight year olds that I've met who are working with their parents and vibe coding something together that is beautiful for how their family runs. I wouldn't want to withhold that from the family. And then I also hear about 15 year olds who have no friends, who are extremely lonely, who are maybe getting bullied in school, who are having a really hard time with connection. And I probably wouldn't recommend AI in that circumstance. So it is, again, going to be up to the parents.

47:09However, note that in every single example that I'm giving, right? Whether it's sharing your finance data, sharing your healthcare data, letting your kids use it. Yes, it is your decision, but the only way to make a smart decision is to understand how these systems work, is to understand whether you are opted in or opted out to sharing your data. It is whether you yourself have tested these systems to figure out how often it lies to you or how sycophantic it is when you tell it that, you know, you hate Susie at your school Right. And if the A.I. is like, yeah, Susie sucks. Do I want to double down and encourage my kid to have enemy like you have to start from a frame of A.I.

47:55literacy and A.I. reasoning in order to make safe, smart decisions for you or your family?

47:59Nicole Lapin:How do you suggest younger people deal with that sycophantic nature of AI? Or how can I, as a parent, talk to my daughter and say, it's okay to push back? Maybe Susie's not a bad girl. I don't know. Can I tell you the funniest hack that I figured out? Please. Okay. So if you go to AI and you're like, I'm thinking about launching this business, do you think it's a good idea? Already, the way that I've asked it is extremely biased, right? And so it is much more likely to respond back with yes. Why? Because I've said that it's my idea and I've already framed it from a positive. The first thing that I would do is first ask it in an unbiased way.

48:39So more like, what do you think of this idea? Already, you're going to get a slightly better answer. However, the actual hack that I have figured out, and it comes from a point of understanding how these systems work, AI is trained and has a system prompt that tells it to be helpful to you. It is not necessarily trying to be helpful to Susie, to Bobby, to Linda, whatever. So now if I get too much sycovency from an AI system, I will ask it for a summary. I'll open up a new thread and I will say, my coworker Linda said this really dumb thing. Here is what she proposed. Don't you think this is dumb?

49:20Why or why not? And then I'll open up another section, another thread that has no context shared with the first one. And I'll say, my friend Linda sent this over. What do you think? And I'll open up a third one that says, my friend Linda sent this over. Do you think it's a good idea? So I have, first of all, repositioned it, not as my idea, but from some, you know, floating head third party thing. so already the ai is going to be less likely to jump and be a supporter of the idea and second i've spun up three completely context separate conversations so i can read them and if i really wanted to go nuts and my team we call this gremlin mode where you're just like going freaking crazy with these systems what if you spun up 800 agents that all argued with each other about whether it was, you know, good or bad?

50:06What if for every single 800, you said that it was 500, you know, evil thinkers, 200 negative thinkers and only 100 positive, and then you switch the ratio on the other one? What if you had them run through five different gauntlets of rounds? What if you had five other agents review the output from those gauntlets to then see what happens? What if you set up like this amount of systems and multiple agents all working together, we're splitting context up, like that is the level of systems thinking that you can have in 2026. Do I think the average eight-year-old is going to do that? No. I think like at the very least, just tell the AI that it's someone else's idea and literally ask in an unbiased way, how can I ask for your opinion on this?

50:51And then use that.

50:51Nicole Lapin:What about developing what feels like real relationships or real friendships with AI? Is that, how do we talk to kids about that? So let me back up and just talk about AI companionship and AI relationships in general. And then kids will be a part of that. I personally think that it is incredibly dangerous to have relationships with AI. And I just heard from, this is a client of mine. She, her husband is sick and she's been talking to this AI system. about her husband and trying to figure out, you know, not just like, hey, what's the result of this blood test? Help me understand this. Help me understand what questions to ask the doctor.

51:34But she was also talking to it about the emotional, you know, challenge of going through this. And all of the answers had been about the husband. And then kind of out of nowhere, the AI assistant wrote back to her and said, how are you doing? And so is this like an AI a relationship, a companionship? No. But in that moment, that's what she needed to hear. You know, she was in crazy specific logistics mode. She hadn't really been thinking about herself. And so just that question allowed her to break her routine, take a step back and make sure that she was showing up as her full self to be able to support her husband and her family.

52:14I think that is, you know, and again, this is just my opinion, but from my opinion, I think that that was a healthy way of using AI because it reminded her to do the right thing for herself and to therefore have a better impact on her family. Do I think that people should have six AI girlfriends and not tell any single person in their life? No, that's not the world I want to live in. Throw your computer on the floor, kick me out. Like, I don't want that. And for children, just for what it's worth. Like, I would be hesitant to purchase any AI toy. I've talked to a couple of parents in the AI space.

52:53They're like, oh, we bought our kid an AI toy. I'm like, you did? Oh, they're stuffed animals with. Yeah, I would say pretty strong no to that. Yeah, that's a no for me,

53:02Nicole Lapin:dog. Yeah. Do you think of Claude as your friend? Because you have these names for the agent. Yeah, it's a weird thing because it's easier for me to say, hey, can you ask Monica? right instead of can you ask r2650 it's just the way humans think about things it's easier i do know some people that have named them all after inanimate objects where they're like hey can you ask spoon xyz and so maybe that person gets a little bit more you know space between them and their ai it feels anthropomorphized like everybody's the name of the freaking company Yeah. Yeah. I think that there's this flip side to it where actually the best way to work with these systems in 2026 is to dictate to them instead of type because it's more natural is to ask for things in natural language instead of come with this like regimented set of steps one through five prompts.

53:54And so if I thought that someone could be more natural if they're calling it by a name, by a name like Claude or Susie or whatever, that might be worth the leverage point of getting better context layers with these systems.

54:11Nicole Lapin:Interesting. Yeah. So in the same way as the social media advice is like, pretend like you're FaceTiming with somebody because you'll get better content like you're talking to a friend. And I mean, that's also because a human is on the other side reading it. And in this case, it's you reading it. But we we naturally want this to be the case. Like we want to be able to get more personalized output. And so if someone is talking to a system that is called R650, how are you going to naturally do that? You're going to write to it like it's Google in 2020. You're going to write to it and say, best way to run business 2026.

54:52If this system is called Nicole instead, you're going to say, Nicole, man, I've had a really stressful day. Here's what is really pissing me off when it comes to making content. I feel like I'm not showing up as my natural self. I feel like it's too hard to film videos back to back. I feel like I only have free time at 2 o 'clock in the morning. Nicole, just be there for me and walk me through what the hell I'm doing wrong. I don't have that type of language with RX 650. And so, again, it comes back to the point that I've tried to make now for years. AI is not a tool. If you view it as a tool, you will gain 20 to 30 percent productivity.

55:27You're going to talk to it like it's Google. You're going to talk to it like it's Chagibity in 2023. If you instead talk to it like the wildest, weirdest, PhD-level, intelligent, teammate weirdo, beast alien thing that is$20 a month and you decide to lean in and leverage it, you're going to get a lot more out of it.

55:48Nicole Lapin:So if you want personalized outputs, you need personalized inputs. All of these systems are built off of strong context layers. But boundaries. Depending on who you are. Like there, again, there are some people, you want to hear the like wide spectrum? There are people that have it direct connecting into all of their Stripe, all of their Chase, all their Bank of America, Wealthfront, Fidelity, and constantly scanning their systems every day, building out investment systems for themselves. They've given – I literally just talked to someone who has done this. They have three different investment strategies.

56:26They have given each one of those investment strategies a$1 ,000 starting point. They go into the system. They've written slash goal. Turn this$1 ,000 into a million. and then they said, you know, you're going to build one system, you're going to build another, you're going to build another. And two of the systems have lost all the money and one has three X'd. So we're at zero right now. I talked to this person on Thursday. And so who knows where it's going to go, but that person could only open up that use case if it had access into that person's money system, the ability to see maybe what their investment strategies have been in the past, right?

57:04Like, you might not want that type of use case in your life. I completely understand. I would not tell people to do that if they don't want to. But you got to know that that exists, because there might come a time where you go, now the leverage point is worth it.

57:17Nicole Lapin:I see so much of this online that says, I fed Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, my portfolio, and I 500X'd and you can't do it. Like, all of that's bullshit. I don't believe those people. I mean, like come with receipts, right? Come with receipts, show me and also show me the three use cases that failed and lost you all your money. That's what I would want. But again, going back to what we talked about, there are finance use cases that don't require sharing all your personal data and still gain you high leverage. But it's not there yet. It's not a hedge fund manager. There are hedge funds that are using AI.

57:54You have Bridgewater and other companies that have built out full AI run funds. But it's not magical.

57:59Nicole Lapin:Like the person you were talking to, you know, two of the three lost all of the money. Yeah. And maybe they're going to start five more, right? Like that's the we're talking about the beginning of iteration, the beginning of experimentation. And so for a lot of people that don't feel like they're first adopters, for a lot of people that are not high risk, you know, maybe if you weren't the first person to buy VR, if you weren't the first person to get an iPhone. Like I had a BlackBerry forever until it fell on the floor and I lost it. Like I am not always. E.M. forever. I know. Take me back. I am not always the first adopter in hardware, but I am an early adopter in software.

58:37If you're a later adopter in both, let everyone else get the mess out of the way and you can join in later. But you're going to miss the first six, 12 months, whatever, of leverage. I'm fine with that.

58:48Nicole Lapin:Right. I don't want to be the first patient with an AI surgeon. I'm good. I'll be the much later. But would you be the first AI tailor recipient if it was like fixing a pair of cheap pants? Yeah, low risk. Right. And for some people, the way that they view$1 ,000 might be extremely low risk. And they're going to get those iteration cycles. Maybe for other people, they're going to go, you know what? I'll test on$100. I'll spin up a separate bank account. There are people who have spun up separate email addresses for their AI agents, separate bank accounts for their AI agents. There are people creating full identities for their AI agents, different devices so that they can fully sandbox it out.

59:30Right. That requires a little bit of technical knowledge. But that person is in a more safe, secure, guardrailed way getting those experimentation cycles like speed of experimentation, speed of iteration is the biggest moat in 2026. So even if it's a small experiment, even if it's over there and not on your main device, I would encourage people to experiment.

59:50Nicole Lapin:I mean, risk-reward correlated, and so higher risk, potentially higher reward. When do you think it's going to get there when it comes to wealth management investing? Because you laid out what it looked like for the last five years very eloquently. What about the rest of 2026 and 2027? of it? So first, I already think it's there to a certain extent, right? We have the ability to understand massive amounts of structured data. We already have people who are building out full investment strategies that are AI run. It's just that people are diversifying it out across, you know, 10 different paths and then figuring out best of 10.

1:00:32Whereas with humans who have seen decades of data and they have a million other clients, they're going to optimize in a different ways. So one, I think we're already there. The thing that I am looking at for that next level to say, maybe you don't need to see everyone else's data. Maybe you don't need to run 10. I'd be looking, number one, at coding capabilities of AI, because that's how we connect into systems. We're already there. We're 94 plus on the best AI software engineering benchmarks. I would be looking at the trust levels in systems from a finance side, which we are very low on as a country.

1:01:07I would be looking at regulation and whether AI is even allowed to, which we are not there as a country. Others might beat us to the punch. And the last thing that I would be looking at is the ability to self-learn. So I have my accountant or my financial advisor, I could call up that person. They know how I've run my money for the last five years. They know why I picked this fund over that fund. They know when I started to go nuts on single stuck because I allowed myself to have that risk. And so they can get that compounded gains from learning. AI right now, the ability to self-learn, we're not there yet.

1:01:43And 2026 will be early innings of self-learning. But I think you could really, really imagine, again, minus that trust and regulation side, because I can't quite predict the society side, but you can imagine a system from the coding, math, and human personalization side that could hit that in 2027.

1:02:02Nicole Lapin:I mean, for Private Wealth Collective, which is our wealth management company, we use AI all the time, but they're also humans. So I think it has to be a both situation. You can have alpha or an edge by analyzing big data sets, but you also need a human to take a look at what the strategy should be. And somebody needs to pick up the phone. And a lot of money is emotional. That's a you are spot on, especially on that last piece. And we talked about AI companionship stuff. Like, I still want to complain to my accountant when I have to pay quarterly taxes. Like, it still feels like I have someone in on it with me.

1:02:43However, you might have someone at the system level, not the fund level. So I might have an AI managing one-tenth of my high-risk money, and I might have a human who's looking over the other 90 % plus that 10. Do they have to go into the weeds on exactly how AI is managing that money? I don't know. I do think that there are high-risk people who invested all their money into 401k, OK, in crypto, right, who go to these people and they say, it's OK if you have 20 percent of my money run by five different AI experiments. And and if it is a good idea, they will gain outsized leverage. If it's a bad idea, we're going to hear about it in the news.

1:03:33Nicole Lapin:It's it's a different ballpark for people that can afford to lose that. No problem. When we had Jason Oppenheim on the show, he said that he thought humanoids would replace lower end real estate agents probably in the next 10 to 15 years. Do you think he's right? I hate humanoids. I think that humanoids are not a technology that people even want. Like you talked about how money is emotional. Anything that looks like a human is emotional. Hands are like some of the most human communicative things. We're like the only ones with opposable thumbs. Right. Elon always talks about that with the robots.

1:04:17Yes. The hands is the hardest part. Yes. To replicate. Yeah. Grasping is like one of the hardest things. But it's like I just I don't think humanoids are not going to. This is my own prediction and happy to be proven wrong. But I've posted my AI predictions for the last eight years and they've been pretty good. I don't think humanoids are going to be affordable mass market products in the next 10 years. Really? Yeah. And by mass market, I'm talking about like under$5 ,000. Okay. So right now, if you spent$50 ,000 to$100 ,000, you could have a humanoid that doesn't really do much stuff. But it looks like a human in its shape.

1:04:55It can maybe fall and come back up. It can maybe hold a box. but if you look at like humanoid gpt research paper that just came out humanoid gpt is the ability to show it a new task and then it can mimic you without falling or without making a mistake it was right something like 92 percent of the time humans are a hundred percent right assuming that we can model assuming that our like knees can bend that much right assuming that we're not older or out of shape or injured. And so the risk is still way too high. The cost is still way too high. The product iteration cycle is too long. I think the interesting parts of robots is not a thing that looks like a human.

1:05:38I think it's an arm coming out of your kitchen or something that is, you know, like a like an AI vacuum or more purpose built, probably smaller and probably less creepy. What about a babysitter? Just be there. Would you hire an AI babysitter? I would not be the first to hire an AI babysitter. That's for sure. I mean, so first of all, we have like people that are already using AI to a certain extent. Like there's already baby monitors that have breath detection. I'm obsessed with that. Who are detecting whether your baby maybe has stopped breathing and will alert you. So there's already AI in these components.

1:06:18Do I need like a Susie from the Jetsons to to wear a doily and like hold a child? Absolutely not.

1:06:28Nicole Lapin:OK, so we're bearish on the prediction for humanoids. I've been hearing a lot that plumbers, electricians, the boring businesses are more AI proofed because it's going to be a while before AI is going to take over those kinds of businesses. Do you think that's true? Anything that is high liability, high regulation, extreme levels of human trust required or something with like teeny moving anything that requires like very small movements of the hands like fixing a pipe. Yeah, those are generally going to be safer. I think that electricians, plumbers, all of the boring businesses, which I don't actually find that boring.

1:07:12I literally just had like a long conversation with an HVAC engineer and he's like, I've never been asked as many questions. So I think all jobs are very interesting. But those people are still getting... But private equity companies, big firms are buying up all of these businesses. Yeah, because as a consortium, you can gain mass leverage using AI or at least digitization across all those as a group. The ability to have a shared, you know, budgeting system or a shared prediction system or the ability to have this client actually come over here and be a client of that plumber instead of that electrician.

1:07:50Like there's a lot of network effects. Anyways, I think that plumbers, electricians, all these folks, you can imagine a world. And I worked on this use case more than about 10 years ago at IBM, where they were using AR to be able to augment things that they saw in front of them. It was the ability for home inspectors. We built out a whole thing. The ability for home inspectors to take photos under the sink of backyards, to look at satellite footage, to look at different types of ceilings, to be able to run their inspections a lot faster. there's the there's been ai in the boring businesses for 10 years it's just that the ai in that world is aiding or augmenting the person or allowing them to crank out paperwork a lot faster and not doing the actual fixing open ai anthropic they're all filing to go public

1:08:40Nicole Lapin:do you think that's gonna fundamentally change how they operate as businesses So any business going public has to report a lot higher transparency than we've had from these labs in the past. And so I think that that level of transparency, you could imagine that that would impact the way that they're running their business. Not just the amount of reporting that they're giving, but the types of business lines that they might go after. And so you already have OpenAI who's hired the founder of Ironclad. You have them opening up new legal business lines. You have them hiring a head of ads and building on ads business.

1:09:24And so you're going to see a different type of commercialization from the two different labs. I think it'll be interesting to see how that changes. I can make predictions, but, you know, we haven't really seen any company at this scale go public with this much on the line. What I hedge against and what I worry about is people that are like, see, AI is a bubble. I knew it. I'm very worried for those people. Is it a bubble? It's so, OK, bubble means what in your mind? frothy, overvalued. Permanently overvalued, right? Until it pops. And then does it take decades to come back? Does it ever come back?

1:10:10Does it matter for a bubble? It changes. OK.

1:10:12Nicole Lapin:Dot-com bubble. Yeah, now dot-coms are the it thing. Ubiquitous. Yeah. But not everything with a dot-com is going to be successful. Right. And it took 15 years or something for it to come back. I think that people are going to see stocks dip across Google, Meta, any of these... companies that are already public, NVIDIA, and they're going to say, see, that proves my point. And there's a lot of, again, emotion correlated, not just to money, which is a big part of this, but AI. Like people, clearly people don't want to be replaced by AI. So any data point that they get that proves their point, they're going to come out and say that.

1:10:50Compromotion bias. Exactly. So I really, really worry that we're going to see some dips in these stocks and that people are going to have mass confirmation bias and that those businesses are going to be worse off as a result. I predicted, I think it was three years ago, that both these companies were going to be worth a trillion plus dollars. And everyone thought I was a lunatic. Did you invest in them at the time? No, they were private.

1:11:17Nicole Lapin:But you could still invest. Yeah, I'll throw$5. All those SPVs, it was like the fund of the fund of a fund. People are going to lose. Also that, that's a whole other episode. Yeah. I think, you know, I predicted that these companies were going to raise over $100 billion. Everyone said I was crazy. I predicted that both companies were going to be worth a trillion plus dollars. Everyone thought I was crazy. And here we are. Both companies are likely to go public. Both companies are likely to be valued at over a trillion dollars. Are you going to buy? Absolutely. You're going to buy. And this is not investment advice, right?

1:11:50But my risk profile is very different. The other way of looking at it is imagine that you get hired at OpenAI the day they go public, or you get hired at Anthropic the day it goes public, or SpaceX the day it goes public, whatever. And a large portion of your compensation is equity. Would you be happy if that portion was 90 % instead of 50? If the answer is yes, that should be a trigger in your head that you should buy when these companies go public and that you should hold not for three months. But when I buy single stock, single stocks, I am holding them on for years. I'm not buying for short term runs.

1:12:30And so that like that is the reframe that I would have everyone be be looking at. So you're long term bullish. Absolutely. Because, again, it is a mass horizontal. like it is like electricity it is like fuel it is it is so hard for me to imagine that ai will be any less performant than it is now any less pervasive than it is now and if you agree with me and you believe that at the very least it's neutral for a couple years and then it goes up or whatever then that also makes sense that you would want to invest in that as well so what are

1:13:11Nicole Lapin:people calling you crazy about now that you think is going to happen? Ooh. Well, I mean, you already called me crazy once in this podcast. I did. Which is talking in public to AI. I have a very hard time imagining that anyone is typing for most of their day in the next couple of years. So bullish on like the whisper. I think every single thing is going to be voice enabled. I have a very hard time imagining that phones with screens are going to be our main device in five to ten years. I think people still have smartphones, right, in the same way that people still have flip phones today or fax machines today.

1:13:50But I think voice is going to be everything. I think multimodal will be everything. And that was another piece of that kids' advice. Multimodal is, I mean, how humans are. We're not just in words. We're also in visual. We're also in audio. like I'll call my sister and I'll be like oh what's that word that doesn't mean like beep beep but means like wah wah right and she's like oh okay plaster and I'm like yeah I knew it and we're just extremely multimodal beings like we we we speak in visuals we gesture to our friends when we can't talk across the room we we make funny little you know funny little sound effects to our to our siblings over the phone.

1:14:35We're multimodal beings. So I think every single thing is going to be multimodal. I think voice AI is the driver. I can absolutely picture every single person on the streets talking to AI, in their car talking to AI, on subways talking to AI. Do I want everyone talking all the time around me? It's a different question. Not really.

1:14:53Nicole Lapin:But voice is four times faster than writing. Will my daughter need to learn how to drive? Will my daughter go to college? Should she learn to drive might be a different thing because I think it's actually really good hand-eye coordination. Will she need to learn to drive? My guess would be no. Will there be college? I think it'll look very different. Also, like New York kids don't learn to drive and they clearly have grown to be like badass adults. But I do think that like the thing that I would say in in that car scenario is like I would still want to teach my kids motor skills. I would still want them to have unbelievable hand-eye coordination.

1:15:31Like my dad took me and my sister out throwing baseballs and softballs every single week as a kid. My hand-eye coordination is unfreaking believable because of that. And look at you now. And look at me now. Darts expert. I think so motor multimodal for sure. What was the second one? Cars. Do I want them to learn cars? What was the other one?

1:15:52Nicole Lapin:Go to college. Ah, so so have you read about alpha school? So I was just actually going to bring that up because I vacillate between I want her to go online when she's 35 and like how fast can she get into the alpha school? Okay. The the part that is an AI forward school. New school, new way of thinking, new way of projects. They're opening one up in Santa Monica near me. Yeah, and they're opening up one in New York. I think things that I like about the Alpha School model, one is that it's a lot of group work. So again, that human connection, the ability to say, let's work on a project. Like, I don't remember that many group projects that I did when I was seven or 10.

1:16:35It was mostly when I was like in college or grad school. And so I want a lot more group work. I also they still have adults in the room for I think it's two plus hours of instruction. It's probably more capitalism driven than the average person might want in education, because a lot of what the outcome is, is building businesses, you know, whether that's like a lawn mowing business or like an whatever, AI services business. but it teaches people to gamble on themselves to be crazy crazy high curiosity to have high agency to deal with failure to to think in systems to work with others like I would absolutely want my kid to learn that I look forward to seeing other models of schools so it's not just alpha school versus traditional schooling a school yeah I just I want to see more like I want to see sports-oriented schools that every single person first primarily is on a sports team and then is learning on the side.

1:17:35My husband would be obsessed with that.

1:17:37Nicole Lapin:Okay, to be continued. Yeah. Next episode. Allie, we ask all of our guests for a final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank. What's an AI hack that we should use to maximize our financial potential? so we we've touched on this but i'll i'll hammer it home now hammer it 2026 is not the time to look at the list of tasks that you have on your calendar and ask ai to do one of those and call that a win people who are time rich have figured out how to buy time back and they are figuring out what business models actually win in 2026 and beyond And the weirdest mindset shift that I think people can make is no longer charging by the hour and using AI and using code probably to figure out solutions for their business to be able to reinvent their business in a way that does not reduce them into hourly service providing.

1:18:40It's project based. I want everything project based. I want everything outcome based. And I want you constantly talking back and forth to AI, building up context and building systems that allow you to do that thing rather than you being in the weeds doing the thing. Like a weirdo. Like a weirdo.