Why Oura pulled its $15BN IPO + is AI making us dumber?

0:00This is The Curve Weekly, where we read the finance news so that you don't have to. I'm Vic Harris, a finance professional who's made a career making money for other people. And I'm Sophie Woolwright, ex-TV and radio producer who was sick and tired of not understanding the economy, how to invest or build my wealth, so we started this podcast. But before we dive into the headlines, here's a word from today's sponsor.

0:20Did you know Generate have a team of advisors who will actually meet with you and help you make sense of KiwiSaver? You can book a no-cost KiwiSaver advice session via the link in our podcast show notes. And thanks to Generate for sponsoring this episode of The Curve Weekly. Emma, I am podcasting right now from Bigur in Spain. Have you heard of that part of the world? I can't say I've heard of it, but I'm really jealous of this jet-setting lifestyle. I feel like you've had the most intense work period and then the past three weeks, you're having this absolutely enviable, romantic, loved up world-shoring life that I'm looking on with absolute adoration I'm just in awe so I basically didn't holiday or have a break for such a period of time yeah I remember you saying you were just kind of feeling burnt out in hindsight I think I'd spread it out more I this is me I thank you so much I um a week ago decided to quit coffee and now I just had a coffee delivered right to the podcast couch in Spain.

1:26So you're back on coffee. So I'm back on. I felt amazing for a week, but now I've realized me and coffee are great friends and I'm actually a much better podcaster when I can string a sentence together. As we get older, we have to cut out quite a lot of the vices that typified our youth. And I think coffee is one of those things that is a wonderful thing to keep in one's agenda. I have like three coffees a day minimum. Same. It's good to be back. I say it's good to be back. So I think that's like... I don't smoke. I love you, Jennifer, a week. Except for mushrooms. So it wasn't quite the shot.

1:57No, I mean, I was having full-on withdrawals. I was having migraine withdrawals from not drinking coffee. It was insane. I realized how addicted I was. And I was the smuggest person that I wasn't drinking coffee. But how could you possibly be in the most romantic part of Spain where coffee is delicious, newly engaged, and be not drinking coffee? I think I can get over myself and just lean in. You can be smug about something else. Good thinking. Maybe running. I'll go back to running and just annoy everyone with the one run I do every month and talk about it till the cows come on. So okay, I need to paint the picture.

2:34Baguere is this tiny little Spanish town which is kind of French inspired. It is quintessential European tiny little cute streets gorgeous little houses orange lamp lights on the side. We walked after dinner last night just having a quick look around it is gorgeous i think it might be one of my new favorite places in europe and unfortunately because my phone is dead and sitting in a bowl of rice because it drowned in the rain in barcelona can't even send you a video to show you how gorgeous it is but it is stunning right now i have to paint the picture for everyone listening while sophie describes this utterly beautiful surrounding she is sitting in what looks like a kind of dog house surrounded by cushions.

3:22It feels like quite juxtaposed to the idyllic picture that you're painting, but I'm just going to believe you. I promise you the reason that I'm having to surround myself with big brown cushions and the reason we don't have video is because my phone is dead, but this house is one of those really tall high ceilings, like kind of cobbled floors. There is no soft finishings, which, as you know, for a podcaster, is not ideal. I walked in and I thought, this is the most beautiful house I've been in in a really long time. However, how the actual hell am I going to record a podcast? So I've just taken all the pillows and surrounded myself with them for this podcast.

4:00So yeah. Red or green, Emma, what's going on in your life? I feel like it's obvious for me that I'm using my emergency fund to buy a new phone. We don't need to go into that anymore. How are you? What's going on? Yeah, I'm good. We haven't done a red and green for ages. I was trying to spare you from it. We had a month off and it's great to now be, you know, confronted with my finances again. So thank you. Actually, you know what? I am sort of in the green or I'm forever in a kind of neutral green. As I've just come back from a kind of press PR trip to Berlin, I went with Mubi, the independent film platform, which is just fabulous.

4:34Hey, Sophie, if you want to be smug about something, get into Mubi and their independent films. you can then just be dropping in all these kind of niche film noir references or whatever and people will be floored more i fear i'm not cool enough for it like i am such a basic love taylor swift love a blockbuster but i will give it a go because some of the films you told me about before we started recording sound amazing so we basically had a weekend um it's like my dream weekend my boyfriend always takes personally he's always just saying you're so overstimulated all the time because I just consume so much information, podcast, books, film, every slot of the day that isn't working, I'm consuming something.

5:15And so this weekend was my absolute dream weekend. So I went away with Mubi and we just had a full weekend of watching back to back films, documentaries, podcasts, recordings with the directors being interviewed. Oh, I was so overstimulated and I loved every minute of it. Did you have a notebook? the notes I've come back with I have reams and reams and reams of notes with god knows what I'm gonna do with all these notes I remember it wasn't even that long ago actually we went to a presentation talk event about negotiating and how to negotiate your power and Emma and I were sitting next to each other and I completely forgot to bring out a book or a laptop yeah you invited me yeah yeah I was like oh yeah I was like that's such a cool event I'd love to go to that I went I went you went and you took so many notes and I felt like the worst student I hated it I love being the note taker as well but then I do nothing with the notes for me it's actually it's just so I don't get distracted I have to be doing something when I'm like if I'm listening I just I'm not a great passive consumer I do the same thing this must be something to do with ADHD it just keeps your brain engaged just stops me getting distracted but anyway all which to say sorry that from a monetary perspective i was very lucky as it was a kind of pr press trip so i didn't spend a penny i learned so much sophie and i was so filled up with inspiration and i didn't spend a penny so thank you movie for taking me and thank you for keeping my bank account sort of neutral i need to start getting like invited to these things i need my bank account needs it not only do i need the stimulation and inspiration but my bank account i cannot afford to take myself to the movies so maybe if you could please help a girl out do you know i was very proud of you this was the story that you brought up actually emma because it was blasted everywhere so weirdly we've spoken about aura a few times now on the wednesday episode haven't we and i don't know yes we've kind of mentioned aura rings because you said you were thinking of getting one and i met that comment with a bit of skepticism maybe unfairly but i'm just a little bit skeptical about wearable technology.

7:22Not all of it, but a little bit. But let's start with the stories. It's an interesting one regarding their IPO, almost IPO, no IPO. So tell us what has happened in the IPO world of the Oura Ring. Yes. So for anyone that doesn't know, IPO is just the business going public for the first time. Can I just say, what does that mean when a business goes public? Right. So it's initial public offering. So it's the first time that we can buy shares in a business. So up until this point, Aura has been funded by private investors. So venture capital, those sorts of investors who have a lot of money to invest, not a hundred pounds here and there.

8:03So an IPO, I love describing it like in Bridgerton when they have their coming out party and they're walking down the stairs and they're like, I'm finally in society. So Aura was about to have their moment. They were about to walk downstairs and they essentially bailed last minute. They didn't like their dress. They decided their shoes were too, I don't know, wobbly and they were going to fall on their face and they decided to back out. So yeah, it's quite interesting because when lots of businesses go public, it's almost like, let's just say you're walking into the ball and someone before you had gone and like IPO'd and they did a really good job and it was a really receptive crowd and everyone was clapping and super happy for them and wow, gorgeous dress, even if the dress wasn't that great.

8:50You're like, this is a safe zone. I'm feeling good. It's time to go. I'm off. Whereas if you watch someone walk down the stairs, fall on their face and everyone booed at them, you'd be like, I'm actually effed that. I'm going to leave. This is not for me. So there's so many different reasons why businesses go public. I mean, generally, it's because they need more money to fuel growth. And so they need a level of money that is basically like impossible to get just from VC and angels. So they kind of reach a point where they're like the scale, the amount that they need to bring into the company is so vast that they need to basically go out.

9:29Is that right? Yeah. So they wanted to raise 2.2 billion, which is a huge amount of money. Yeah. Yeah. So much money. I'm just imagining that on a like term sheet or anything. Imagine being like, okay, I have two billion that I am in charge of and that I need to work out how to allocate. That just frees me out. It's a baffling amount of money. It's so much money. So in order to get that amount of money, also not all of the 2.2 was going to fuel growth. They were also buying out early investors. so so it's kind of an example would be for us with the curve if we wanted to raise money I'm trying to think of some outrageous thing that we wanted to do I mean I don't know let's say we've come up with some amazing business like a product that we want to create and so we're going to go public because we need to get five billion to do it and some of our early investors are like love it girls you've done a great job we're going to cash out at this point we would have to raise the amount that we need for the new product build plus the money to pay them out so that was what was happening with aura so they were essentially trying to sell 50 million shares which would have been valued at around 40 to 45 usd which would have made their valuation so like the total value of the business, if that IPO'd at this asking price, the whole business would have been worth 15.6 billion US dollars.

11:06So enormous. And also just to put it into perspective, last year, the company was valued at 11 billion. So this is only 12 months ago. So they have essentially, if they had gone public at this time, at this price, they were asking for like a 40 % upgrade on last year. So like 40 % more valuable than a 12 month period. Wait, so last year they were valued at 11 billion. And so this year they're valued at? So because they haven't gone public, they're actually technically not. Like they haven't been valued at this. Because basically for them to go public, for people to buy their shares, that's validating their new valuation.

11:39How much did they think they were worth now? So they thought that they were able to do this, which is essentially valuing them at over$15 billion. Jeez. And to get their$2 billion of cash in to fund growth, they were going to sell$50 million worth of shares at around$40 USD. So essentially it was a chance for them to go to the public arena and say we have 50 million shares. They're around 40 to 45 USD each. Who wants them? So I thought this was really interesting. Eli Lilly, which we've spoken about quite a bit on the podcast before. So everyone knows Ozempic, the weight loss drug. Eli Lilly is one of the biggest players in that industry.

12:16And they indicated that they were interested in investing up to 100 million of shares, which I thought interesting. maybe they were wanting to do some kind of partnership between to pair up for weight loss well it kind of makes sense right to make it safe like maybe aura rings or wearables helps track the weight loss to ensure that you're like looking at your key health markers and making sure you're doing it in a safe way but then aura ring i know that they're expanding like obviously the technology is getting more advanced but from i was just really into i you know i'm skeptical of well this little stuff but they mainly track your sleep i was reading a lot of commentary online saying that they are pretty inaccurate when it comes to tracking your step counts really or a ring yeah a lot of people on reddit were not happy with their ability to track the step count but it was very accurate in terms of tracking sleep now sleep is obviously a really good health metric to keep a track of and can then pair up with other wearable technologies to give us a kind of broader picture so having our sleep data can be great and you can pair that up with you know other bits of health data to kind of paint a broader wider picture of your overall health and well-being but I was a bit yeah I was kind of like is that it like is that all I'm gonna get my sleep like really comprehensive sleep data I don't know I think they do heart rate and temperature as well and yeah but no I know what you mean I was like well I want more I would want like the most in-depth if I'm going to be spending because it's expensive the ring itself is like 300 dollars I believe and then you pay a monthly subscription to have your data tracked no I totally know what you mean but I also what this is the beginning of wearables like I would say the wearable space will be taking off this and we can talk about that in a second but the fact that they track those now I would say it'll end up being probably you're all in one and you have all of your key metrics and it's I would say it'll be quite intense because there's so much happening in the future proofing of the health space you know you can go and get full body scans prevention health is becoming such a thing I just wonder if there's there would be an interesting link between yeah weight loss and what they're planning on being able to track with wearables but it was quite interesting because the CEO basically came out and said like you know we have the luxury of choosing our moments we have the luxury of saying like when we're going to be going public and when you look at the story and you see them backing out because there are quite a few businesses that were trying to go public or meant to go public and are delaying or moving them around.

14:47I think it's quite interesting to look at the IPOs moving because when I first saw a lot of these stories and when Vic and I were first talking about it, I was like, is this a, you know, a big indicator that something bad is going on? Or I was kind of jumping to worst case conclusions, but she gave such a great analogy and I thought it was a good one to share. So she was sort of saying, you know, remember every IPO is a sale and every seller wants the best possible price. You know, it's like any kind of marketplace. If you put up a top you're trying to sell and get second hand and you're like, do you know what?

15:17There's actually 50 other similar tops at the moment. I'm not going to get what I want. You can choose to not sell at that time. And just in the same way, if you were to go to a farmer's market and it's raining, there's probably going to be hardly any people coming to buy from you. Aura obviously looked at the landscape, looked at the environment. They were going to be listing their thing that they're selling, i.e. all of their shares. They're wanting to wait for a sunny market. They want to wait for everyone to feel optimistic and feel willing and excited to pay so that they can get the most amount of money into their business so it's almost just like the luxury of choosing when it's not that they're not going to IPO it just doesn't feel like the time is right because it is just a big sales thing you know and you get one shot at it so what happens next because I feel like there's been a lot of press around this around you know or in kind of pulling back from IPO I in itself that for at least just from a kind of external consumer perspective does make one think oh you know things not going as well like what's happening so what is their next play what do they do now they're gonna wait until they re-announce that they're going public i imagine they're probably waiting for some of these massive ipos to happen to see how they go um yeah exactly like they're just gonna check is anyone else setting up their stall at the market first.

16:36But also they obviously have enough cash and they're like a very successful business. They're not in a position where they're so strapped that they need to do it right. You know, you're not going public for in a total desperation to get cash in. They have big growth plans. So it's just about getting the timing right. But I also was thinking about this because when there's IPOs or businesses that go public, I get quite excited by it. And I think a lot of retail investors get really excited by it because they're like oh my god this company that I've never been able to invest in now I can and it's a brand that I know I understand what it does and we always talk about invest in businesses you know and understand so it's like one it's a really good example of one where if class pass was IPOing I'd be like I use that all the time I understand the business I see growth in it maybe I want to invest but the research around on IPOs is so, it's not great.

17:27Like the first year after a business goes public, often the share price is super all over the show. And generally, like there's a couple of big, really good IPOs you hear about where they've gone up like 100 % and, you know, there's all birds and all these businesses that go public and then go amazingly well. But honestly, most of the time that's not the case. And so whenever we talk about IPOs, particularly Vic, She's not a massive – she doesn't jump at the chance to go in an IPO because it gives you a chance to look at what happens post all of the marketing campaign to go public. What is actually the sentiment here?

18:05Is the idea then – because why would someone then jump at the opportunity to buy shares in a company when it IPOs when that's going to be the moment at which there's so much press on it, there's so much attention. So presumably the stock price is going to be higher. Why wouldn't you just generally want to wait probably like a year to see how things pan out? is the idea that you might just get in at a time when it is much cheaper and you're able to get in early basically. Buying a share in any business whether it's an IPO or not you're buying the share because you think it's going to be worth more so you think you're getting it at a really good deal so that's why when you look at all of like Anthropoc or OpenAI and they're being valued so highly like they're about to take over the world which we're going to get to the next story in a second if you looked at what they're valued at and you thought well I actually think they're even more valuable than that you would buy an IPO if it totally depends on how you're pricing it and and that's why retail investors like us who don't go and look at PE ratios and go deep diving on their financials how are we meant to know if it's being valued well or not that's why you give your money to a professional to decide if they think it's worth it or not so I mean I personally at the start when I first started investing I was so excited by IPOs because it sounded fun and it was like this sounds so exciting yeah yeah but now i'm kind of like okay i'm not as interested but i actually think it could be kind of worth to talk about the wearable industry in general and if we think that is growing because if wearables like wearing an aura ring or a smart watch or whatever is at the start of their boom and they're actually going to be enormous in the future that would be a reason why someone would invest in an ipo because they see the business that it's valued right now, but they can also zoom out at the broader context of this industry and see it as massively growing and therefore maybe think that it's worth investing because it's going to be worth so much more in the future.

19:59Yeah. And I guess to your earlier point, we are at this kind of, like, it feels like we're at the beginning of, you know, the health and wellness space is only growing. Like we, I think we spoke on a previous podcast about health, that like longevity platform, but they want to be the Netflix of like health and wellness basically and I just couldn't believe how quickly they've grown as a company but it was indicative of just how much excitement there is around longevity biohacking and we're only at the beginning where this stuff feels quite novel I think it's all playing into this idea that you can kind of take ownership of your health but you can a little bit kind of like play God a bit you can live for longer you know we talked about Brian Johnson the guy who wants to live forever has become sort of the face of that movement and it feels really seductive this idea that you can actually take control of your health and and you can kind of like pull the strings of your otherwise aging body and look younger live better and like feel more well for longer and that's a seductive offering a hundred percent agree with you and if you look at the industry it is growing and growing and growing for exactly that reason because you're kind of selling to people you can have control over your health and with AI combined with science if you can get an insight into what you need to live healthier longer better lives we all talk about you can't buy health but this is kind of selling the idea you can buy health yeah there's 146 million wearable devices that were shipped globally in the first three months of this year 146 million and that's up 4.3 % on last year so it's up nearly 5 % yeah that's a lot and the fastest growing categories are smart rings so like an order ring smart glasses which I'm like not sold on but the ring I can get on board with yeah and then if you look at the idea of are we in the mainstream or is this still a small portion of society 37 % of American adults have a smart watch which is wild to me Yeah, and it's rising to 44 % for people under 50, which is basically nearly half, which blows my mind.

22:08And like, can I just say, I just had to do just a quick Google. Smartwatches are so new. I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense. But like the Apple Watch was released in 2015. If you think how quickly almost 50 % of the population has decided to take up that technology. And there's more of a focus now on health, on wellness. Like younger people are drinking less. We know there's a kind of shift away from the drinking culture that typified in my university days for sure to sauna culture and to like people going sober, all these sorts of things. I think that plays into this. Yeah, this wider cultural phenomenon of us just being more aware of our health.

22:43My hesitation with the Oura Ring, you know, data is useful. Data helps us better understand ourselves. Anything that helps us better understand ourselves can help us actually live better. Fab. Great. Can't argue with that. but I'm more interested in how do you create long-term behavioral change so if you want to be if you want to be healthier ultimately that means you need to exercise more you need to eat well you need to avoid alcohol we kind of know those things and I think sometimes there can be a bit of a kind of false comfort created by just having the device and just seeing the data that it kind of gives you this full sense of control like you're already doing the thing like by just having the Apple watch on and watching my I'm kind of doing the thing to be better and actually doing the thing is getting up and going to the gym.

23:24It's not eating as much sugar. It's avoiding having alcohol every night of the week. And I just think it can create a little bit of a lull. And I was just, I did a little bit of a deep dive into people's reviews of Oura Rings online. I mean, there's lots of people singing their praise and saying, this is great. And then people saying, yeah, listen, it's great for giving you some initial data so that you can better understand, oh, what does affect my sleep? Oh, alcohol affects my sleep. Telling you things you sort of already know, but proving it through data. But then once you've kind of tracked it for a few months you kind of have that understanding and it's just whether you then choose to cultivate the habits and the changes that actually improve that data or you just kind of sit on it.

24:03What I think is really interesting is that rings are still very early so while watches have become quite widely adopted of people who believe in wearables only 14 % of them have a smart ring. So that is like the growth story here in terms of the IPO, in terms of Aura future-proofing its business. It sold like four million rings up until the 30th of June this year. So like that's a huge amount, right? And 72 % of the members for Aura are women. So what that tells me is that Aura is probably a slightly more feminine play than perhaps smart watches, which I would say is perhaps slightly more masculine.

24:41According to a government survey, more women than men own smartwatches and wearable devices. In many recent surveys of global data. Particularly with rings. They're now partnering up with cycle tracking apps so that you can, because you know, because the aura rings track your temperature. So you can, I think, sync it up with natural cycles. Yes. So there's a big move with an aura ring to now also sell it to women as part of your kind of monitoring your fertility health. To your point about it being at the beginning of like, you know, it's just beginning. and the rings being quite a new piece of technology that's only going to get more advanced and thus more appealing to a consumer it's also a really smart business model because you purchase a ring which is actually quite expensive you think four million have been solved they're like what three hundred dollars or something each it's a big upfront cost and then you pay a subscription and you think you've already bought in the idea okay i've already committed x amount of money to this ring obviously i'm going to keep subscribing because i want that data otherwise that was a waste of money in the first place then you have people on subscription paying monthly to track their data i mean that's smart oh it's so clever and actually i'm so glad you brought that up because the more i talk about it the more i'm like maybe i would invest at the ipo if you're paying like nearly six us a month for your subscription or like it's around 70 a year for an annual subscription the psychology around that to pay regularly if you've already invested in their technology is a no-brainer.

26:05But from a business perspective, making up almost 20 % of your revenue from subscriptions, which is essentially, it's an 89 % gross margin, so that's almost all profit, basically. Wow. It's so genius. It's so genius. And also, you have a vested interest. You don't want that to be a sunk cost. So if you're paying for that data each month, you're more likely to care about that data, And thus, I think that can probably help keep whatever good habits you're ideally cultivating in response to that data. It's keeping up with those habits. So actually then becomes self-reinforcing. And I just read somewhere that actually the subscription model also then does drive long-term retention.

26:47So you keep your customers in. I'm on board. I'm on board. I mean, I want a ring. I want the ring. I think that new design is much cooler. In general, I think the whole wearable space is going to be something that starts to burn. That's my vote. The way that they're marketing them now to Oura Rings and they've got people that have great style wearing them. I am such a sheep and I can just feel myself wanting one. Also, it becomes a little bit of a kind of symbol of cultural cachet. Like, oh, this is my like emblem that I care. I'm in control of my health. It kind of becomes a bit of a status symbol.

27:21It's almost like the American Express. Like, I have money. I'm healthy. Yeah. Oh, my God. When I see someone bring out that gold card, I'm like, oh. I'm so jealous. Coming up after the break, we have got an absolutely wild, quite exciting, kind of scary update. MetaMuse, what can AI now do on its own accord without you needing to actually tell it? What does this mean? And what are we concerned about when it comes to what we're actually outsourcing to AI? Some fascinating stats that have come in from the Curve community too. So thank you to everyone that's answered that survey. But first, we've got a quick word from today's sponsor.

27:55Okay, the stat is absolutely wild. Consumer New Zealand rated Generates KiwiSaver scheme number one for customer service with 90 % satisfaction. In second place, I will just say, only got 75%, so it's not even close. Honestly, in a world of AI chatbots, sometimes it's really nice to speak to a real person. So if you would like to book a no-cost KiwiSaver advice session with a Generate advisor. You can see a link in the show notes and just a quick thank you to Generate for making this episode of The Curve Weekly possible. Sophie's gave up coffee for a week. She's back on it and she just takes a sip of her coffee and goes, oh, I love coffee.

28:34I honestly would inject it into myself if it was possible. I just love it. So do I. I had a, I have this memory of being, I must have been in about, yes, like my last year of school and I had a assignment that was due the day after and I'd left it to the last minute and I found instant coffee in the cupboard I had no clue how much to put in like I don't think I I mean I must have put like four tablespoons of instant coffee which is an enormous amount sugar hot water and then drunk it and I spent about seven hours blasting cold play on loud dancing around my living room because I was so high on coffee I couldn't concentrate we live and we learn Sophie let's talk about AI because this is like my favorite topic to talk about because it's it's all any media outlet is talking about at the moment like you go into the ft edit every morning and it's like three stories about ai it's like every single angle it's like ai ai and i am so interested to know how we talk how we look back on this period in 10 years time like with the benefit of hindsight what will we make of this like because it feels like we're learning to walk in a new world a world that has ai and we're like bambi we're just like slipping on ice and everyone's like oh my god what's happening how's it changing should I use it should I not use it is it bad is it good and we're just in this absolute like tailspin and I will be so fascinated in 10 years time we look back on this and we think oh we knew nothing and we'll just how much will have changed I think I'm going to want to bury these episodes like in 10 years I'm going to want to go back and delete these because it'll be so embarrassing I mean I don't know how artists release their music and music videos like remember that um Destiny's Child music video and Kelly Rowland is texting back using Excel like you just look at it and you think hilarious cute i feel like this is not going to be hilarious and cute it's just going to be embarrassing but yes we have had some enormous time stamp i think it's fascinating so let's talk about it so there is new stuff happening in the i space new stuff god i mean how do i even sell intelligent in the ai space we all know chatbots right i mean we talk to them all the time, customer service, like they're on every website.

30:41We use ChatGPT, we're used to Claude. There's so many different ways that we interact with chatbots and AI. And that's almost like, I wouldn't say rudimentary, but it's the stuff most of us are familiar with. There has been some huge developments over the last few weeks when it comes to the evolution of AI agents. So it's probably worth just explaining what this actually means. At a really high level, AI agents essentially use the information they have to fulfill tasks without you needing to direct them. So for example, it can browse the internet. It can fill in forms for you. It can create appointments.

31:25It can buy things. It can manage calendars, send emails. It can basically act on its own accord. So what has been sort of a question answer chatbot dynamic is now turning into something quite different. And it's almost this mind blowing, of course, where we're going here. But anyway, so the meta AI agent called Muse, which you may have seen articles or people talking about, was released on September 8th. And it's very quickly become almost the most used consumer agent. So, wow. They're basically, there's lots of stuff happening at Meta at the moment. They're releasing, as everyone will have seen, you know, the glasses, everyone talking about them like the pedo glasses.

32:13But Muse Charm is essentially a device that you can speak to your AI agent. Basically, Meta is trying to create products for these agents to function through. tech journalists are calling these innovations visionary and they're comparing them with like the early doors of apple products wow which is kind of fascinating so meta stock like rose hugely following the launch and i would say general population like there's lots of different um consumer studies and surveys that have happened like oppenheimer did like a do you would you trust meta with your passwords to give these agents access to go and you know act on their own and Oh, no.

32:54Yeah, like 8 % of people are saying that they would, which is very low. But I feel as though this is the first time we've announced it, right? So the idea of AI agents sort of acting on their own accord, it sounds kind of scary and weird, just like Chat QBT and Claude sounded weird and scary originally. We put a survey out to the Curve community last week to say, you know, what are you using? How do you use it in your personal life and work life? I mean, almost everyone is now using AI. And if we'd asked this nine months ago, I would say it would be incredibly low. So while there's a lot of distrust in this space, I mean, I personally, I must say, if I could have almost like an AI assistant that was doing things for me, like booking doctor's appointments, ordering an Uber that I could just speak to, like an AirPod that was like, book me an Uber, I'd be quite stoked in all honesty.

33:41Oh my God, so would I. That for me, outsourcing that type of admin and having an agent that's almost like a personal assistant, stunning. Sign me up immediately. I'm on board. But what, yeah, what are you thinking, Matt? Are you like excited by it, scared by it? What is your initial reaction to this? Well, first of all, I find it's a really interesting move. I mean, it's probably quite expected move from Meta, but an interesting one. They put so much money into the metaverse a few years ago. That's been a total flop, basically. I actually just looked it up and they lost over, get ready for this, Sophie,$80 billion.

34:16dollars so they lost over 80 billion dollars to its reality labs division since 2020 while pursuing the metaverse and related hardware so they've really they went hard on the metaverse i mean you remember zuckerberg was really saying that that's the future we're all going to be living in the metaverse and everyone's like no we're not like no one wants to be like i feel like we're all aware that we're chronically online enough the idea of like donning a big kind of helmet device and just living in this ulterior universe was actually less appealing than they had suspected it would be. This feels like a much safer and more strategic bet from Meta in terms of following where kind of consumer behavior is going.

34:54Because I think you're right. It's really interesting to hear so much of the Curve community have like integrated AI into their like workflow and their lives already, because I agree. It feels like it's become so ubiquitous so quickly at a mass market level. And I guess this is like kind of the next step in that as we begin to siphon off more and more of our day-to-day tasks. I'm going to have to share this on Substack, some of these details that have come through from the Curve community. I'll have to share it on there because I'm obviously not doing video today, but the visual of everyone in the Curve community of who's using AI for work versus personal.

35:25I was absolutely shocked with the sheer amount of people that are using ChatGPT for their personal life still. It was the highest by far. A lot of people are using Claude for work and personal, but by an absolute landslide, people are using ChatGPT for their personal life like outsourcing for so many different things and i was kind of shocked by that i thought we'd sort of got kind of like what someone was trying to create or has created an ai tutor that marks handwritten french for their children i was like holy sorry curve community you're absolutely fabulous i know so just for context the curve community 94 use ai at work which is enormous wow 94 use it at work so everyone's using it at work basically now basically everyone and the people that don't are the ones that are really like quite against it you know for environmental reasons for so because when i went through and i was looking at the people that said no that they weren't using it i was like oh i wonder like why is it the type of work and it was actually just like fundamentally disagree with ai most of the time 85 use it in their personal life which i just thought was like quite impressive actually like what are they used in their personal life so personal life quick responses like replacing google so just like quick q a which i am exactly the same holiday and like travel planning so the same interestingly the third most used case for our community for ai was money like budgeting and investing Ooh, smart.

37:00Recipes, meal planning, nutrition. Wow. Shopping and product comparisons. Parenting and health questions. Home renovation and garden. Personal advice and feelings. Like there's like a lot being used for AI. And then the work is obvious stuff. You know, writing emails and copy was number one. Research and finding information number two. Automation, coding and building tools and agents. Yeah, I was like quite impressed actually with what was coming back from this. And I would love to share more detail on our sub stack. So if you aren't already following us, I'll put a link to that in the podcast show notes.

37:33If you subscribe, it's free. I'm going to put an article out in the next week just looking through this data in more detail. It's so cool. And thank you to everyone that filled it out because it's really interesting to compare these stats with what I found when I was looking more at global trends. But I feel like everyone's pretty up with it. Yeah, I'm really interested to hear that. And it reminds me, I want to do a day, and I've seen quite a lot of people do this, just designate a day or some founders to really learn how it works. Because I think I'm still using it in a very rudimentary way and not getting the most out for sure.

38:04One of the things that's been the most game changer for us as a business, but also for me personally, is building and using AI to create a more lean, operationally clear, data-driven business. and I didn't realize that this was even possible, but we've now built our own Curve platform. And I know I've showed you this, Emma, but all of our posting, all of our content, all of our data, everything that we do, and also all of our processes have been so, so streamlined by AI. And one of the things I wanted to say is that I do think it can be overwhelming the amount of tools that there are to use and the different platforms that you can go to when I was looking through what the Curve are using.

38:48a lot of people are still using Copilot because their businesses block them from other apps and products. But what I don't think enough people realize is that you can use what exists to build custom AI solutions for whatever your business is. And if I didn't have help with that and someone else to help me build something that I really trusted that was custom, I'd be so overwhelmed with the concept of that. But having gone through the process, learning, and full disclosure, my do I say fiance? I feel like I say fiance now. God, it sounds weird. But Luke, Luke is so heavily involved in this space.

39:25And so what we've been able to create for the curve has been amazing because I can ask all of the questions about why, how, like it's very strategic. So he basically sat down with me and was like, what are the holes in your workday? What are the time sucks? What are the things that you think could be more efficient? What do you wish you could be using? And we basically built something that was specific for the curve and what I don't think a lot of us realize and I definitely wouldn't if I hadn't been able to speak to him about it was it's not just question answer or small efficiencies with bookings and all of that kind of thing you can run an incredibly lean accurate data-driven business that's safe and secure by leaning into what is available if you have people that know what they're doing and it's been so epic for like everyone that sees our reporting from partnerships or how we function we're a tiny team but our output's huge and it's only because of what we've been able to build and that's why i think is like spending that time actually really learning like i saw as i said a few founders that um i follow who have just dedicated like days weeks to just sitting down and learning like okay a bit like what you did with loop especially if you work you know a lot on your own if you're running your own business, you don't even know what it could help you with.

40:43You don't even know how you could integrate it at the most efficient, like amazing level to build systems that can make your business like, you know, times it by three, make your revenue so much bigger. And if you don't even know what the potentiality is, then you can't even be building for that. So I think it's actually spending time researching and understanding what is even possible will make a big difference. But also what I would say on that, and actually Luke and some of his business partners from his last business have just started this business called Outsource because the whole idea was like he was seeing how much I was struggling to find the time to research and build my own things.

41:17And I think there's a lot of people in that position where their day job is so intense and so busy, they don't have the time to spend two weeks doing it. So if you can outsource it and just say, these are my issues, can you figure it out? I do think there's something in the outsourcing of that because for me I just kept avoiding avoiding avoiding as soon as I was like do you know what for me outsourcing and paying like five grand to build this platform rather than this constant nagging in the back of my head of I know I'm behind I know I could be doing more has helped me a lot like you can't be good at everything learning and being on top of what AI is capable of is a whole full-time job side note for anyone who's listening to this whole section and thinking I actually need to do something about this but like me you probably don't have the time to figure out what you need I promise you throwing money at this problem is worth it and it's so much cheaper than going and getting consultants and all sorts of other things like it saved us so much money we don't have to spend on external finance people operations people which honestly if it wasn't for AI in this platform we definitely would have needed to so regardless of what size your business is if you do want to speak to them I'll put a link in the podcast show notes could not recommend it more I feel somewhat conflicted on the AI piece personally because on the one hand particularly as someone who has always run their own businesses solo you know anything that's going to make running your own stuff easier cheaper more scalable great like excited about as long as it you know it's legal then I'm excited about that but I went to this really interesting philosophy talk a few weeks ago that was held by this philosophy traveling event series Sophia.

42:56There was a neuroscientist who was interviewed and she's also the author of this book called Tiny Experiments and she runs a lab called Nest Labs in the UK. Her name is Anne Law LeCun and she warned of how AI is affecting curiosity and that gave me a really interesting new lens which slightly colored my thinking about my own usage of AI. And she basically said that historically when you wanted to find an answer to a question you would kind of begin a search. So you would ask a friend then maybe you'd go to the library you'd seek out a book and in that process of researching there would be a lot of incidental learning um which she termed like the curiosity state so you go out looking for an answer to one thing and you'd end up incidentally um finding tidbits of information about lots of other different things google began to change that because of its like search bar you still would kind of you'd have to kind of go through a lot of different um things that would throw up so there'd be lots of different like papers articles whatever.

43:49So there was still that possibility for existing in that curiosity state. AI has basically eradicated that possibility for incidental learning. We can just type in our question and we get our immediate answer. Yes, this can be efficient. And if you do just need like a really quick answer to something that you are grappling with, great. But she said that can really hamper our curiosity and the way our kind of brains are functioning, because we're just missing out on a lot of like incidental learning, you know, the tangents we fall into can end up being really interesting and actually quite important to our work or to our thinking?

44:22I think the curiosity piece is so interesting. Also the learning element and the way that it is almost degrading our skills or hampering younger people who are trying to build and learn their skills when it comes to critical thinking. There's almost this weird paradox between if you have the skills, so for example, you're really creative and you're great at writing, Whatever it is that your zone of genius is, by relying on AI too much, I mean science and the research that's coming out shows that you can really erode your skills by relying too heavily on it. It's like a cognitive outsourcing where you're no longer using that part of your brain.

45:02Where AI is amazing is supercharging what you already know. So if you're really good at something, you can use AI in a way to supercharge that. But the problem being, particularly for young people using AI, is they're not learning those initial skills. So they're not able to develop those parts of their brain to then use AI in a way that can be really productive. And there was this really interesting study that I looked at. It's new research that's come out of MIT, and it looked at 54 students. And they basically gave them the task of writing an essay. It wasn't a research-focused assignment, but they used a group of people that were allowed to use chat, a group that were allowed to use Google search with AI summary turned off, and then one that had no tech were only using their brains.

45:44And they basically looked at the way that their brains were engaging with this subject and how active they were. And no shock that anyone using AI, they were 55 % less active in terms of their brains. and they scored lower on memory, on recall with their work. Like all of the essays looked the same. And then the really interesting thing is they then did the exact same study four months later with the same group, but they switched up what groups people were put in. And the researchers found that the original ChatGBT group, even though they were now not using technology, were consistently underperforming compared to the other groups, which is so fascinating.

46:22I think the most interesting part of this is that people who weren't using AI initially but were now permitted to use it showed much higher brain connectivity so there's there's a lot of synergies or almost like it's it's it almost is like the equal and opposite it's like if we can teach people to have critical thinking curiosity and and not lean into like brain rot or being lazy at a young age it's helping them develop skills for ai to be super positive we haven't got the parameters yet around it so the cognizant the way that we're outsourcing our brains means that it's hard for young people to develop their critical thinking their curiosity all those things but then also if you're older and you know like our age it's almost the least dangerous because we've already developed all the skills we're really good at so we're using MI as a way to supercharge but you have to be so careful that you don't then as a result degrade your skills that you have which i thought was so so interesting so it's almost like being really aware of what you're outsourcing yeah and not losing the ability to do it yourself without it because the other day i like turned off at work and and me and lucy and a bunch of others were like oh my god what do i do yeah you know because we've just become so reliant on it i think it's so important particularly for women not to fall behind in these moments of technological innovation because i want women at the forefront of building and creating with these new technologies so that we don't fall behind, particularly as a lot of the tech, the AI companies are once again, they're run by men, the men are getting lots of money to run their companies.

47:53So I think it's really important, particularly as women that we are keeping abreast of, and we are making the most of what this new technology can help us with. I think to your point, it's also then not making ourselves more useless in that process. And I think, you know, when I left the talk that I'd mentioned, I felt it didn't put me off using AI and it didn't say, you know, didn't make me think, okay, I'm never going to use it again. But it made me think, okay, I want to make sure that I'm building in to my weeks opportunities for that incidental learning that she mentioned, for those kind of curiosity trails where I'm not just seeking to be hyper efficient and getting the answer to the question I have right in front of me, but actually give myself like intentional opportunities to wonder and to fall down a rabbit hole of information that actually might lead to something really interesting that ends up sparking a new piece of work or a new idea for something for the next book or whatever.

48:52She mentioned a piece of research where they found that waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, so that time between finding the answer to a question and it first coming to your head, in that period you are in that state of curiosity and you're better able to remember unrelated information that you encounter along the way. So actually you're soaking up and retaining more information that you will then have kind of long term than if you just go straight to question, answer, question, answer. So it's just being aware of these things so that we're able to utilize AI without losing the ability to stay curious and to nurture our kind of critical faculties in that realm.

49:31I think that's such a valuable point because our brains inherently, of course, love mental shortcuts, but it is also that effort and the trying that is so important in a learning process and also a key to having a healthy brain. The more active that your brain is, the more protected you are from cognitive decline, not just losing or eroding your capabilities, but actually looking after your brain health. So it definitely comes down to figuring out what are the things that you want to outsource? What are the things that you don't? And also consciously leaning back into the things that you're outsourcing just to check that you can still do them.

50:10I actually have written a list of the things that, in terms of figuring out what to outsource and what not to, based on all the research we did for this episode. I might add that into the sub-staff article too for anyone that's interested. To actually learn and understand a topic and practice a skill well, you need friction. and AI is taking so much of that friction away. And there was this really interesting quote from Jared Bench. He's a professor and clinical neuropsychologist at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas in Austin. And he said, it's like you're at the gym and a robot lifts the barbells for you.

50:47You get nothing. You don't want to atrophy your creative muscles or your brain muscles. And I thought that's so interesting. It's okay to get the robot to lift the thing, but you have to remember that the process of learning, of researching, of understanding, actually your brain is a muscle. And so the things that you outsource be very deliberate of not essentially your brain, your skills are deteriorating as a result. So let's sum all this up, put it in a Substack article for anyone that's interested in reading more about this subject. because as we see these developments come in, especially this idea of AI agents, I mean, I am all for automating the boring admin in my life.

51:29I personally will be leaning, if there is technology that I can speak to my earphones or a random Tamagotchi from Meta or whatever, and I give them my logins and it makes my life more efficient, I'm all for it. And a lot of professionals are using this sort of AI wave and innovation and comparing it to when we invented electricity and talking about this idea that inventing electricity, i.e. let's imagine that the electricity companies are just like Claude and Chachabutee. it's not the electricity companies that are now running the world that are the biggest most efficient amazing profitable companies it's what the electricity enables us to create off the back of it and so what's quite interesting about that is if you look at meta claude open ai anthropic all these big businesses ai is like the electricity what we create and what ends up being the biggest, most innovative businesses off the back of that.

52:29And that's why you're seeing meta come up with these, these like, uh, like the Tamagotchis or it's like, what are the innovations we're going to see as a result? And, you know, maybe screens become irrelevant. Maybe we don't look at screens anymore. Maybe apps are totally irrelevant. And actually it's just the agents that are talking to the tech and the infrastructure behind the scenes, like book me an Uber and you don't even go onto the app you don't use your phone it's just your agent talking to uber you know it's like it's the idea of what this is enabling is actually a much bigger like yes the story right now is around agents acting on their own but the story that's bigger than that and the innovations that we we will be seeing i think are so much more beyond what we're imagining right now that's such a good comparison thing because like electricity allowed us to work long days it meant that we no longer had to arrange our day-to-day life in like response to the weather, in response to like hours of sunshine we got and then like how long we could work by candlelight, which is like transformative.

53:33I think while we have this conversation about what AI can do and I know we're beginning to wrap up, we also just have to acknowledge the risks that are so inherent to the way that it is being built currently and the speed at which it is evolving. Just thinking from a safety perspective, like how much information we're inputting into whatever AI platforms we're using just being aware that there are a lot of safety concerns that haven't really been fully addressed. And just this weekend, David Robinson just resigned from OpenAI and he led transparency work for OpenAI's safety team. But he basically resigned saying that he's concerned that the company isn't taking seriously the risks that it is creating with the technology it's building so rapidly.

54:13So he suggested that we need two changes. First, AI companies need to rely more on their safety expertise that already exists. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models and their successors will make safe choices when we aren't looking. And so he actually suggested that AI companies look at how nuclear power plants keep the safety, the way that they kind of keep nuclear power plants safe. And he was like, that is such an inherently risky space and piece of technology. And AI companies need to go there and be, okay, what are you doing?

54:52And how can we reflect the infrastructure you created in order to make sure our technology is safe and it's acting in accordance to regulations that we can set? Because we know recently it's kind of going off and doing its own thing. But I just think it's worth, as we all go hell for leather, incorporating these amazing technologies into our lives to just be thinking in the back of our heads, like the risks that it does still pose and just being aware of how much information that we are putting into these platforms. It's so interesting looking at the Curve community data when looking at this, because there was 82 % of people that said they're really worried about AI.

55:24And the main concerns, the top one, which nearly 50 % of people were worried about, is interesting because it's about the idea of I feel like I'm getting dumber, like the brain rot, losing critical thinking, which we've spoken about. The second biggest worry was privacy and personal data, 32 % of people. Like someone said, how much it might end up knowing about my life, what it might then know about me, my kids. A lot of that was coming into the concerns. But I've loved this conversation. Yeah, this has given me a lot to think about with regards to AI, my use of it personally, and also just more broadly.

55:59Yeah, what opportunities it could also create for me in business, which I'm not currently even thinking about. So I am going to leave this conversation with a lot of research that I want to do and to look into. So thanks, Lazo. If anyone has any comments, questions on what we spoke about, share it wherever you're listening. It's quite fun to be able to see them if you're listening on a podcast platform because then everyone can see your questions. But as I said, if there's anything personal or you want to contact us directly, please do. Thank you for listening. Have a stunning week. And we'll see you on Friday for a Raising the Curb episode.

56:32Bye, everyone. Thanks for listening. See you later. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to The Curb Weekly. make sure you hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening so you're always up to date with the latest finance and investing news and feel free to leave a comment to let us know what you thought about this episode because we would love your feedback we've got new Curve Weekly episodes for you to listen to every Monday but until then listen to Erasing the Curve these are our in-depth podcast episodes where we chat about all things money we're also around all week on socials if you're hungry for more Curve content and all the links are in this podcast show notes we hope you have a great week and we'll catch you for the next episode of the Curve Weekly on Monday

57:14Okay, quickly, the Curve was created to empower and educate you about investing, but we are not financial advisors. Our platform exists for educational purposes only, and it doesn't provide personalized investing advice for your individual needs and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. And always remember to do your own research before making any investment or financial decision. We're here for any knowledge and support you need, but the final call is always yours. And thanks for being here. You got this. Yeah, we know you got this.