ABOUT THAT WALLET
ExplorePodcast overview and latest content
EpisodesBrowse the full episode archive
ABOUT THAT WALLET Website

Podcast

  • Explore
  • Episodes

Recent Episodes

  • 352: [Tina Berger] Invest Like a Mother
  • 353: [Mike Ryan of BPNai.com] talks about the AI Trust Problem
  • 354: [Denise Joseph] Build Confidence with Whole Brain Thinking
  • 355: [Tiffany Grant] Money Moves and Mindset Shifts
  • 356: [Dr. Tommy Rhee] Stem Cells for Sports Recovery

Links

  • Apple Podcasts
  • Overcast
  • ABOUT THAT WALLET Website

About

ABOUT THAT WALLET

ABOUT THAT WALLET

About That Wallet is a financial lifestyle podcast hosted by Anthony Weaver. It's designed to help the sandwich generation build strong financial habits and make smarter money decisions. The podcast covers a wide range of personal finance topics, including Budgeting and saving, Investing, and Debt management. #aboutthatwallet #financialhabits #sandwichgeneration Support this podcast: https://www.aboutthatwallet.com/

Powered byPodRewind
    ABOUT THAT WALLET
    Episode••39 min

    353: [Mike Ryan of BPNai.com] talks about the AI Trust Problem

    I get the opportunity to speak with Mike Ryan, the CEO of Bullet Point Network, about how investors can avoid garbage in; garbage out with Ai and raising money even when your business is not AI focused. Mike Ryan is the CEO of Bullet Point Network and former Partner at Goldman Sachs, where he served as Global Co-Head of Equities. A former Investment Committee member for the Harvard Endowment, he brings more than 20 years of experience in investing, leadership, and strategic advisory. More about Mike https://bpnai.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ryan-bpn/ Support the show (Every dollar helps keep condiments in the fridge) Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/aboutthatwallet Patreon: https://patreon.com/aboutthatwallet https://aboutthatwallet.com Join Monthly newsletter: aboutthatwallet.com/newsletter Disclaimer The information in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice. Please consult with a qualified professional for advice tailored to your individual circumstances. Episode 353

    Apple PodcastsOvercast

    Transcript

    0:01

    Welcome, everybody back to another exciting show, the about that Water podcast, where we help the sandwich generation build strong financial habits so that they can talk about money, spend money, and enjoy their money with confidence. Today I have somebody who, I mean, by all means, definitely needs a round of applause. He's been doing this for well over 20 years, really helping out financial industry not only for just yourself, but also from venture capitalist perspectives. Welcome to the show. Mike Ryan. How you doing today?

    0:32

    Thank you, Anthony. Great to be with you, sir.

    0:35

    So, Mike, I mean, really, at the end of the day, a lot of time, money is flowing all over the place, and now AI is in the mix, and we trying to figure out this whole AI thing as well as money, and it just seemed like we keep falling behind. How do we do this from an economical and even an ethical standpoint? Let's go with an ethical standpoint because we just don't trust it some of

    1:00

    the time, no doubt. Well, listen, it's a super important topic to start the show with. Maybe the biggest issue that we're facing in the world right now is how do we get the most out of technology and lately AI without having it be problem for us, without it getting out of control or causing us more harm than good. And I think, you know, standards and ethics and even regulations, which a lot of investors don't like to hear or talk about, are going to need to, you know, come into focus. You're going to need to have very high and clear standards for how AI is used, and you're going to need and want to have some level of appropriate, you know, regulatory structure around it, actually, because it's so powerful. I mean, I've been looking at financial markets and investing for, as you said, you know, over 20 years. I've also been a junkie for technology and innovation for all of that time and more. And this particular intersection of AI and investing is. Is unique. You always hear, hey, it's different this time. And usually you can, you know, be careful to take that with a pinch of salt, but it is really very, very different precisely because it's so fast and powerful. And so it's something that can move at light speed. It can assemble information faster than anything we've seen, and it can produce or create content and output in ways that prior technologies really were not doing. And so if we don't have a high level of focus on the trust issues, on the integrity issues, on the safety issues, we could quickly find ourselves being overwhelmed by forces that we haven't properly controlled and maybe one day can't control. So I think it's a really important thing to be, to be thinking about.

    3:03

    You brought up a good point far as the understanding of the trust of the actual tool. And we've seen it over and over again with multiple examples of some of the basic things such as the very first one that I've seen was how many Rs in raspberry. It will say two. And they finally caught on. Somebody maybe let's hard code this into all of the platforms. But then recently I was just asking it for dates for some event that was actually on the website and it couldn't even get the day right. And I'm like, you would think it'll kind of catch on a little bit more. So why, like how could we actually now trust it or what processes that you're doing to kind of make sure that the information is as accurate as possible.

    3:53

    Yeah, no doubt. So we're building a very special platform. So we're building an institutional grade A decision quality platform for private equity, venture capital, credit investors that do tremendous amount of research and analysis and modeling on each and every decision that they make. So to some extent we're dealing with sort of the highest standard of investment rigor and thinking that there is. These are folks that are very, very experienced, they're very well trained. They typically have, you know, MBAs and gradu degrees as well as PhDs and some of the underlying sciences that they invest in. You know, biologists are studying biology, life sciences companies and engineers are studying engineering companies. And then various kinds of financial analysts and MBAs are doing the work to kind of vet these companies. And they might be spending, you know, thousands of hours. And if you think about the Malcolm Gladwell book, the famous 10,000 Hours of Time put in to become an expert, these folks are spending the 10,000 hours multiple times over. So we're shooting for a very high degree of accuracy and reliability and trust. And frankly, the way that we have attacked it, Anthony, is first and foremost to build quality control and trust into every step of the process. One of the oldest phrases in the book is garbage in, garbage out. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how rigorous your process is. If you got bad inputs coming in on the front end, you're going to make bad conclusions on the back end. And that's true in personal financial management. And sort of all your audiences making real world financial decisions under time pressure and information pressure, they don't always have all the information they need. They don't always have all the time they want, but they nonetheless have to move forward and make some decisions. And the first thing you have to do is make really careful workflows so that you're not pulling in false or faulty information that garbage in, garbage out problem. We handle that in a variety of ways. I'm not going to give a demo or bore your listeners with a thousand feature functions of the bullet point network AI platform. If they want a demo, they can get one in 10 minutes. But the key thing is source control, source prioritization, making sure that someone is deciding, yes, these sources are valid and we are automatically pairing on our platform the most relevant, most reliable and most recent sources to the questions at hand. If you just type a prompt into ChatGPT or Gemini or something on the web, you're going to get whatever information is on the public Internet and it's not typically prioritized in any fashion. So the first thing we do is prioritize a set of sources and organize a database so that the information being used to drive the answers that you're getting comes from those trustworthy, reliable sources. Second thing we do is we give you visibility into it. We may have done the automatic pairing, but we tell you what sources were used and if you don't like some of those sources, you can deselect them. Say, no, let's not use those, let's use these. Just like you might if you hired a smart young person to work for a human being. You might say to her, hey, I want you to look at this topic, but please don't look at these sources. These aren't helpful or reliable. Let's focus on these. I know these to be good ones. And then you get a footnote or you get transparency. You can see the, the actual chunks of information that were driving your stuff. So that's the very first thing we do. The second thing we spend a lot of time on because our core users and our clients are numbers oriented people, they're typically trying to think about, if I invest at this price, will I make a 5x return over this time period and will that be an acceptable IRR or rate of return, given the risks that I'm underwriting or taking? So numbers matter to them quite a bit. We enable them to connect their own trusted spreadsheet into the analysis so you don't have to worry about AI guesses doing all the calculations. You can use inputs you trust, formulas, you know, because you saw the spreadsheet and outputs that you trust. And so the connection between trusted sources and trusted numbers is very, very important to Us. But the last thing which has kind of been implied in all the answers I've given you about this is you need a person. We call our platform AI+1. The AI is doing its thing, but you're the one. You're the person who has to supervise, control, decide, ultimately edit with nuance and judgment the conclusions that come out. So you can't go and shouldn't go on autopilot where you just sit back and let AI do 100% of the job. But if we can save you 80 plus percent of the time and give you a higher quality, more rigorous answer, that's a win. And if you do that with an AI plus one framework, you can come out far, far ahead. I mean, I think, you know, one of the many issues that people are grappling with today in addition to like, is the answer trustworthy and reliable? Is, you know, is this thing going to help me or is it going to take away my job? Is it going to hurt me in my life? And you know, what I often say is it's unlikely that AI on its own is going to take your job. But you may lose your job to someone who's using AI better than you, who's building in workflows and trusted processes and being a smarter, better user of this powerful technology. And that's what we're trying to help our clients to do. And that's what I think a lot of your audience is probably spending its time thinking about how can I use this to help me to be high ethics, high trust, high control, and to get efficiency and power without having some problems.

    9:39

    Hit me. Now you talk about the use of AI and how the person can actually utilize it. So take us through as if I'm brand new, coming in to meet your company for the first time, looking at the demo. Hey, that sounds great. I want to go ahead on and say, as a business owner, I'm trying to look into how to invest my money the proper way so that I can vet other companies before I decide to invest in them. Is it something like, hey, I got to come up to you with hey, I got like $10 million, hey, I'm ready to invest inside company X and you guys will actually run the model against it just to kind of say like, hey, this is the good or bad, like thumbs up, thumbs down type deal? Or is it more of a guide?

    10:27

    Yeah, great question. So we basically have templates and prompt libraries. You know, we have 500 battle tested prompts that have been used by many, many investors and tested and evaluated by us many, many times. We make that available to you. If you're looking at a company, you might have questions about the people, the team, the leadership, the management. You might have other questions about their customers than their competitors. What's their ecosystem look like, who are they going up against, what is their product or service, how are they pricing it, what's their delivery? And you might have other questions about their intellectual property, their moats, their competitive advantage. We've got that and many other categories sort of scoped out with a battle tested array of prompts. We also have fully configured templates that can do certain things right off the shelf and are very well organized and have good flow and connect into spreadsheets and charts and tables with numbers. But for both of those, whether you build it from scratch, just a white sheet of paper and you say, let me pull in the sections I want to analyze, or whether you start with a template of ours, you can immediately tailor and customize it because each company is unique. And so even though the, the template might be a good starting place, this company today is going to differ from a company that I analyzed a week ago or a month ago. And so you want to be able to configure and tailor it precisely. I mean, customer concentration might be a very big issue for this company, whereas patents and intellectual property might have been a very big issue for the last company. And so you have the ability to sort of start with a template and move very fluidly through tailoring and customizing it your own way. Interestingly, you can just write questions of your own. You can type with your own hands, just like you can with ChatGPT. And so you don't have to live just with the prompts and the template library, you can ask your own questions and you'll still get that quality control layer. We'll still pair your prompts with the most relevant and appropriate sources to give you the best possible answers. And then if you want to go further and do spreadsheet modeling, you can take our templates and you can drive your own assumptions into them. You can also stress test the assumptions that are there. You can actually ask, do research on these assumptions. Are these reasonable assumptions? Do they look about right to you? AI? And then it'll give you a full array of evidence and it'll tell you, yeah, this assumption is well supported by the evidence we have. This other assumption is conflicting. It's contradictory with the evidence that you have, so you might want to be careful about that. And this third assumption is completely unsupported. Either way, you don't have much information, you're just making a call and you don't have any basis for that in the evidence that we're looking at. That's kind of helpful to know because that'll give you a flavor of, hey, I better do a little more homework on this one.

    13:17

    Because.

    13:18

    Because if it's an important assumption and I don't have strong evidence to support my thinking, I may want to do some more research on that so you can come into using our platform and you can know exactly what you want. And frankly, a lot of our fund clients, a lot of our institutional venture capital funds or private equity funds, they have their own templates. They know exactly how they want to look at a enterprise stocks company. They know exactly how they to look at it. You know, an AI native company or a professional services company, or a plumbing supply company or a manufacturing company. They have frameworks and formats that they have used many times. If that's the case, we mimic their framework. We don't impose our own, we do what they want. And if you come to the table with your own approach, these are the topics, these are the ways, these are the ways calculations I like to see done, we mimic and follow that. If you don't, you can use our templates and our 500 strong prompt library to build your own analyses very, very quickly. I mean, most people can get a first piece of research and analysis done on our platform in about 10 minutes. They can get a very high quality piece of work done in about five hours. And that would include tailoring, iteration, spreadsheet calculations, charts, tables, numbers. By the way, lots of smart institutional investors might spend five weeks or some might spend five months studying a company before devoting 10 million or 100 million or more of capital to it. Because these are big decisions. These are mission critical decisions for their firm and for the people involved. So they might not rush, but they still want to be efficient and get high quality, thorough, trustworthy information in their hands in the first day. And then they can iterate and collaborate with their team for as long as the process allows. As much research and thinking as they want to do and as much case building we can do upside, case, downside, case, base, case, all kinds of scenarios. All this stuff is made much more possible by automated AI workflows. But it shouldn't replace the brain and the human thinking that they do and the AI plus one concept with a human directing and controlling the process is what we preach.

    15:31

    Thank you for that because I just want to shout out to the people that are listening right now. Thank you, Dr. Sev, for tuning in. She actually posts a comment in here which she 100% agrees with you, which is to say, like, yes, we can, we must supervise AI. And that's very important to know your stuff. But also you need to look. If you don't, you can't vet AI. And it's kind of an odd way of putting that phrase, but I understand what she's saying. It's like you really can't vet it without really knowing look. Yeah, you have to know yourself.

    16:13

    I think it's super insightful comment from her and I think we're actually getting into another golden age of domain expertise is what I call it. If you know, you know, if you really understand something, especially if you maybe ran a business for the last 10 or 20 years in a certain category or sector, you've got deep domain expertise. If you think about, you know, non investment stuff, think about a doctor. Why do we go to a doctor? Well, we go there because he or she went to medical school. They've also seen hundreds or maybe thousands of patients that had similar things and they have amassed a deep well of domain expertise and knowledge. Now, AI can be an enormous accelerator for those of us who have that domain expertise. But to your listener's point, it's really those who do, who can craft the right questions to ask and can kind of spot check the information that comes back and say, hmm, that doesn't seem quite right to me. Or maybe that's too superficial. And you know, again, I being candid about AI because I am very, you know, impressed with the power of it. But there's a lot of AI slop out there. We've all encountered it, right? There's a lot of superficial, smart sounding, maybe it sounds good for the first 10 or 15 seconds, but when you go a level deeper, it's not robust, it's not insightful and it's not precise. And so those who have domain expertise, like your listener said, I think can do a tremendous job of both organizing the process, directing the questions, spot checking the answers, and then putting their own AI plus one stamp of nuance and insight on the final.

    17:53

    Yeah, I do it a lot with AI when it comes to podcasting and I ask it about when I was formulating a small show that I'll probably release later. But one of the things is that I was just asking it about the approach of how would you do this? And I was like, well, you should do this and have this and stuff like that. And I was like, that doesn't sound right because from if the audio wasn't good, the audience isn't going to listen, then more than likely you're going to lose them within the first five seconds. And it was like, exactly.

    18:24

    And that's because you have deep domain expertise and how to do a podcast. You know exactly what your audience wants and how to do it well. And so, you know, my, my two cents on that, Anthony, is I think just a general, kind of useful rule of thumb for your audience might be don't let AI take the first pass. Most times you should start with the first cut. You tell AI what's on your mind and then have it deepen, maybe produce some information or evidence that you may not have had time or ability to look at yourself. Maybe frame it and pretty it up and help you make it the right length and the right articulation, make the right outputs and slides out of it. But if you take a back seat on step one and you let AI steal the march and tell you, you know what it's going to do, then you're going to get, I think, a big, big garbage in, garbage out problem, and you're going to get a lot of, you know, AI slop. And one thing we're going to find is the world does not need any more generic AI slop coming out in terms of content. It needs smart, sharp, human, controlled stuff that's maybe been made faster and enhanced through AI but don't let it take the first pass.

    19:34

    Now, you know, I can say with a couple gray hairs that I've been around the block a little bit. AI is still new and, you know, we having this discussion as if we've been playing with AI since its inception. What do you say for people who are afraid to hire a young person that's eager to get into AI versus somebody who's knowledgeable in a domain to hire them because they have a little bit of gray hair.

    20:03

    Sure. Look, I have probably a lot more gray hair than you, and I've been around these blocks for a lot longer. I'm older than I wish I was. I grew up in Staten Island, New York. I went to college at Yale up in Connecticut. It was a lucky break for me to go there. Had all kinds of scholarships in financial aid, came out of that, got a job on Wall street and stuck around there for, you know, a couple of decades and got a chance to, like, work with up close, both our clients and my colleagues that were really good at their jobs. I always thought about it when I became a Hiring manager or when I started my own business and started hiring the team. You really want two traits in everybody that's on your team. You want them to be trustworthy and competent. Simple as that sounds. An awful lot of people fail one or both of those tests. And so I think AI off the shelf. AI ChatGPT Claude off the shelf. It probably wouldn't pass a first round job interview with most firms because it doesn't have enough trustworthiness. It does have a lot of speed, power and research competence and it can summarize and write very fast and fairly well, but it doesn't have enough trustworthiness. And so the thing that I would say to people that are hesitant to even pull the trigger on starting and experimenting themselves or bringing a person on the team is I do think it's a genie that's not going back in the bottle. I think you're either going to figure out how to use it well, how to build your own level of trustworthy workflows and checks and balances and both integrity checks and accuracy checks into the workflows that you do, or you're going to watch as your competition and your neighbors do that to your detriment. That's not going to replace smart people. And I think a few smart people thinking, being domain expert, having high judgment and high integrity will be able to make a huge difference. I actually think AI is the biggest benefit that's ever come to people that are smart, hard working and knowledgeable and willing to leverage their expertise. I think you're going to see more 10x and 100x employees and colleagues and people because of AI. I mean, just stepping back and looking at things that we see in our, in our business every day. We've seen more companies go from zero to a hundred million dollars in revenue faster than in any time in history. We've seen more companies get to these levels of 10 million, 100 million of revenue with fewer people, smaller headcount than we've ever seen in history. That's because largely of the power of technology and also specifically the power of AI. But you have to take the leap to do something with it. You can't just hear about it and talk about it. And then once you start doing things, the truth is we're all going to find they're going to be flaws. Just like you said, it can't get the right number of Rs in a word. I mean, I will ask again pretty soon a question that I've been asking AI every year for the last few I'M not a tennis player. I'm actually a big basketball fan and former player. But I like watching tennis even though I don't know how to play it well. And the US Opens a really fun event in New York. And I always ask at some point about the second week of the US Open competition, I asked AI a question. How many American are left in the men's bracket? How many American competitors are left in the women's bracket today? And each of the last three years it has gotten that question wrong. And I've used different platforms because it's kind of a little bit of a subtle question. You have to know a few things, you have to look up a few things and perhaps connect a few dots. And so I'll keep asking it those kinds of questions and I'll keep trying to build source piles and footnote transparency and workflows to try to help my AI, the kind I'm relying on when my reputation is at stake or when my capital's at stake as an investor. I want to make sure that I've got more process control and source integrity than I can get from my little US Open question. But I'm going to ask it again this year. I've asked it of perplexity, I've asked it of Claude, I've asked it of various OpenAI models as they've come out. I'll do it again. And I'm hoping that here in 2026 we can get the right answer at the beginning of week two, because that

    24:24

    would be a real story that you hope it'll be the same thing 2025.

    24:30

    I'm hoping that it'll be better. And that is the truth. I mean, AI is really moving fast and what AI can do today is very much different, like almost night and day, unrecognizably different than what it could do. And the so called ChatGPT moment of late 2022, in just these, you know, three to four years you've seen tremendous improvement, but it's still not fully trustworthy and you still need some process and quality controls in there, otherwise you're going to get left embarrassed or, you know, disappointed.

    25:03

    Yeah, I had a recently interviewed somebody who I believe they acquired a bank, a fintech bank and what they wound up doing was firing about 60% of the stat because of AI and then still was able to maintain the cell level work. So from your perspectives and the way how you're growing your business, are you, because I know you mentioned that you do a twofold. Are you going to try to tend towards the kind of shift more AI or you want to start to bring in more people with expertise and long length of knowledge into your business.

    25:45

    Great question. We have both. I am again a bit of an old dog, hopefully learning new tricks here. I like people that have credibility, have expertise, and have enough scar tissue from mistakes they've made and things they've learned and people they've worked with to recognize patterns and make smarter decisions, including recognize where they may be blind or wrong about certain things. And that's not an easy thing to find. I mean, people that are truly skilled and have taken those experiences and translated them into useful ways to process information, make better decisions, give better advice. Those people are few and far between, but we want everyone at our company to be one of those people. So we sometimes call them Renaissance reps, with a nod to the Renaissance era of Leonardo da Vinci, where people were good at many things and they had a tremendous breadth of skill. And it's almost amazing what was accomplished in the world during that period of time in art, in science, in life in general. So we want our team to be full of Renaissance reps. It does come down to if you're an analyst, you have to be good at financial analysis. So we hire people that have done a lot of financial analysis and have built, you know, thousands of spreadsheets and written many investment memos themselves. They can both do that work exceedingly well. And they can help us build AI process and, you know, skill test it, sanity test it, and quality and control it. Similarly, we have a big software coding operation here, but we have 10x or I think now approaching 20x engineers. We're AI native and so we're doing lots of stuff with AI coding. But you need those people to have a slightly different skill set. It's not just about writing the code, it's about designing the project and quality controlling the output. And that's a different level of skill. So I think in general, you're going to want to fewer better people. And that's a little bit scary for us. I mean, again, I like to think about my own career. I mean, I started out, I wrote a lot of research reports and analyses and built some models that, you know, were used by, you know, the whole of the firm at times. But to be candid, a lot of the work that I was doing was and would have been appropriately called, quote, unquote, grunt work. And if what you're doing is grunt work today, you're probably not on a path to great success. You need to sort of Be willing to work hard, but you need to have some more value added because AI can do the grunt work faster and better than the grunts like me. And so now you basically need to be a bit smarter and have a bit more intuition, insight, judgment. The skills that I think will never go away, Anthony, are creativity, having an idea, having insight at the conception of

    28:48

    something,

    28:50

    persuasion, having the ability to communicate and do so convincingly and sell and then judgment, being able to make a final decision, taking all the inputs in balance. They don't all exactly weight equally and making a conclusion. And so creativity and persuasion and judgment, I think those skills are more valuable than ever. Far, far from going out of style.

    29:10

    You're hitting a key point right there. When I was, when you said persuasion, they were talking about how they are hiring more people who can tell stories then they can do hard skills of like the stem. They want people who are great in the fin, like not finlit but literature, who are good storytellers and so forth. And that brings up a good point of as we go through to the features now of, from my perspective, I found that AI is pushing lazy people to be more proactive and answer things faster than they have been before. Like pushing projects. Oh well, I can get to it. When I can get to it, I can do it, whatever. But when you get somebody that's from like out of high school, like oh, I can just use AI right quick and this is. And then next thing you know they producing close to 80% of 100% of somebody producing out and management think that's great. And then now there's causing that person with the expertise to kind of step up a bit. Are you seeing that same thing in your industry?

    30:14

    I am. I think it's, it's, it's literally raising the bar. If you are doing something that is easily replicated or replaced by a routine, a software program or an AI prompt, then you're, you're probably going to have to do something different and do it, do it fast. I think raising the bar is, is a really good thing for society. It's scary though because if it's my job that might be eliminated and what I thought was so valuable and value added is now easily reproduced by AI. That's really scary for me. I'm going to have to learn some new things. I might have to have some skill training, might have to start in some different areas and fields. But I don't think it should be alarming to us as a society. If you think about the Industrial revolution or the agricultural Revolution. It used to take, you know, virtually all of us, 90 plus percent of us working in fields to just feed ourselves, just to basically, you know, have the food to stay alive. Now we have 1 or 2% of the population with a lot of technology working to feed ourselves in countries like the United states and the G7. And that transformation has unleashed all the other people to explore their potential and learn new things and do new things and become more creative and impactful. We went through that, of course, with the industrial revolution, you know, when railroads and factories came in and lots and lots of workers were displaced from their jobs by machines. And we're going to see another huge wave of that with robotics. We already have pick and pack machines doing simple robotics, but we'll have more humanoid robots doing things. And that can be very scary because a lot of labor is going to be displaced. But I think again, over the course of time, if people are open minded and open to re skills and retraining, they can be unleashed to do higher and better things. But I'm not going to say it's not scary because it really is and it's very humbling. I mean again, I was kind of proud of my work growing up at Goldman Sachs and it helped me to become a partner there and you know, be held in high esteem and you know, be on management committee and partnership committee and this and that. And then I went to, you know, Harvard's endowment and I managed $6 billion of direct investments and allocated another $12 billion as a limited partner LP in other people's funds. And I think I was generally considered to be smart, hard working, doing a good job. But a lot of the stuff I did for like 10, 15 years of my time is now available in 10 minutes by AI and that's scary. So I've got to do something better. I've got to have insight, I've got to have judgment, I've got to elevate myself. And I think that scares a lot of us and scares me a ton.

    33:03

    So, you know, I mean, for the sake of time, is there anything that we didn't touch on that you think you can touch on? Right. Quick, before we get to the final four questions.

    33:14

    No, look, I, I think there's a lot of similarity between what people are doing with their own, you know, personal finances and what institutions are doing with their own investment process. Boiling it down. We're making high consequence decisions. I mean, I might not be, you know, making a decision like a private equity firm to invest $100 million in a single company tomorrow. But the decision I make as to whether to put my money into this mutual fund or that mutual fund, and whether I buy this insurance policy or that insurance policy, that's equally high consequence for me and my family. And so when you're making high consequence decisions, what do you want? You want good information, you want rigorous analysis, and you want, you know, clear thinking. And to the extent that you use modern tools that can assemble information faster and keep your brain and your head on your shoulders, I think you can make better, smarter decisions. Where I think you can get into a dangerous place is if you don't do it at all, if you don't modernize your workflows at all, you might be passed by. You can equally and maybe faster get into trouble. If you trust it too much and if you think this is great, I'm going to hit autopilot and I'm just going to get this automated final answer, and it's going to be wonderful because it's so intoxicating, it's so fast, and it sounds so smart, but there are things wrong. One of my favorite little tricks to do, I happen to have five children. I'm blessed and lucky to have five children, and some of them, the workforce now, and they love to use AI, they love to use Claude, and they love to talk about, you know, how fast and good it is. And so one thing I like to do with them is find mistakes. Just find mistakes. You got this spreadsheet, you got this research report. Here's a couple of mistakes in it. And if you had presented that to your boss, whomever your boss is or turns out to be, you would be in hot water now. You would be embarrassed, maybe fired. Similarly, if you didn't have a boss and you made a decision and you actually wrote a check and how you invested in this company based on that model or that analysis that has some flaws in it, you would be at a loss. You might literally lose your money, lose your investment. And so I think it's just good to keep doing real things. And I call it real work. Let's have AI do real work, and let's see what it's good at, see where it's flawed, see how we can process, improve it so we can get some. Some power at it in our personal lives as well as in our business lives.

    35:42

    I'd like that. I'll probably do another deep dive in that one. That was great. So, ready for the final four questions?

    35:50

    Sure. Absolutely. Fire away.

    35:52

    All righty. So final four question. Question number one. What does wealth mean to you?

    35:59

    Wealth means having the freedom to pursue the things that are really important to you.

    36:03

    Number two, what was your biggest money lesson?

    36:06

    The biggest money lesson was to be open to risk and to be willing to take risk risk, but to do so with a lot of caution and a lot of thorough, rigorous analysis. If you're afraid of risk, you won't get returns. But if you're reckless about taking risk, you will quickly be out of business.

    36:27

    Like you writing a book. Number three, is there a book that inspired your journey or changed your perspectives?

    36:37

    Well, there's a couple of books that have really been great for me and I recommend them and I hand them out to a lot of my colleagues and friends. One is the original Graham and Dodd Value Investing. Not many people read it because it's kind of long and dense. There are some shorter versions of it, but it gives you an incredible grounding in the principles that really define a good investment and a good business. A more recent book that's more on the VC side, it's called Zero to One by Peter Thiel. And that helps you understand how to get a business off the ground and defining competitive advantage in a specific market very precisely. So those two books have really helped me stay grounded in a lot of smart.

    37:23

    Number four, what is your favorite dish to make?

    37:26

    My favorite dish, first of all, again, blessed. My mom, who's up in heaven now, was a tremendous cook, and then my wife is also a tremendous cook. And so I get the benefit of eating well without cooking a lot, which is a great way to live a life to this point. But when I do cook, I like to make Italian food. I like to make chicken parmesan and lasagna using my mother's recipes. And so those are my favorite things to cook. Unfortunately, I don't make them nearly as well as either my mom or my wife. So if you get a chance, take theirs, not mine. But I can put some food on the table that we can both.

    37:58

    And look, nobody's going to tip over with eating, that's what you're saying.

    38:02

    Yes, sir. Exactly.

    38:04

    So this is the very last question of the show, which is where can people find out more about you?

    38:08

    Sure. Well, they can find me@bpnai.com that's the name of our company, Bullet Point Network. Bpnai.com is our website. And you can, you know, connect there, you can ask for a demo there and you can meet me there. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, Mike Ryan on LinkedIn. And, you know, lots of, lots of people connect with me over, over LinkedIn.

    38:29

    Now, if you're going to reach out, make sure you shout out where you listen to them from, which is one of the greatest podcasts out there. Because, hey, why not about that wallet. So just want to let you guys know to remember to put on your shoes one at a time, because you do not want to put them both on the same time. You can fall and hurt yourself. Remember, like Mike said, take your time, research, learn the process, do it right, and put one foot inside once you tie it nicely so you can actually be successful and taking that first step in your journey. So I want to thank you all again, Mike, if you just hold on for a little bit as we do the outro, which I don't have outro music, but we're going to be out. Thank you all. Peace.

    39:17

    Thank you.

    353: [Mike Ryan of BPNai.com] talks about the AI Trust Problem

    0:00
    0:00