Meet Your New AI Coworker

Our 2 Cents – Episode #267

Meet Your New AI Coworker

Ready for your next dose of Our 2 Cents? Steve and Gabriel are talking AI clone coworkers, getting more happiness for your buck, and a question straight from one of our amazing listeners. Make sure to press play and let’s get into it!

1. The Great AI Coworker Experiment:
   • Does AI make you a better worker? One writer created AI clones of her colleagues and put them to the test. Here are the results.
2. Where Money Meets Happiness:
   • There’s more to getting value from your money than you might think. Can you guess the six ways to get more happiness from it?
3. Listener Question:
   • “Steve, I enjoyed today’s program. Perhaps you’d consider discussing what your clients’ investors do when they receive a prospectus online or in the mail. What key points should one look for?” – Angelique

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Podcast Transcript

Announcer: You are listening to Our 2 Cents with the team from SGL Financial, building wealth for life. Steve Lewit is the President of SGL Financial, and Gabriel Lewit is the CEO. They’re here to discuss all the latest in financial news, trends, strategies, and more.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, hello everybody. Welcome to Our 2 Cents. You’ve got Gabriel Lewit here and Stephen Lewit back on the microphone for another great episode of our show today. So we hope you’re doing well. Steve, how are you doing today?

Steve Lewit: I’m playing my role as the other penny and I’m feeling good as a penny.

Gabriel Lewit: Okay. Well, I’m glad. How about just general in real life, how are you doing for our listeners?

Steve Lewit: In real life, I’m doing great. Thank you for asking.

Gabriel Lewit: You don’t always have to answer, just that you’re the other penny.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, no, everything. When health is good and business is good and the world is kind of crazy. I love the cooler weather. Both of our quarterbacks got laid out for the year, so-

Gabriel Lewit: No, I don’t think ours is. I don’t think the Bears guy is out for the year. He might just be out for a week or two, so no. But yes, your QB is.

Steve Lewit: QB Jackson Dart is out for the year, knee surgery, and that’s the end of their season. So my rooting after they beat Dallas, I was like, “Yeah.” And now it’s like, oh God, another terrible season. Anyway, I’m doing great. Thank you for asking.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, good, good. And so yeah, so we hope you’re doing great out there and we’re excited to talk to you today. We’ve got a great show lined up for you. We’re going to kick things off here with a very interesting example of what AI is being used for these days. So AI, of course, is a hot topic still for this year. Everybody wants to know about whether or not it’s going to take over the world, whether it’s going to take over jobs, where it’s headed. There’s still a lot of questions around what are the actual use cases of this that are really still being figured out. So I thought this was a really interesting example that I wanted to share on the show of the way some people are using AI for work. And then you could be the judge of whether or not you think this is coming for your job anytime soon.

So we’ll talk about that. Then we’re going to talk a bit about IRMAA and Roth conversions. We meant to talk about that last time, but we ran out of time, so we’re going to focus there. And then depending on how much time we have left over, we are going to dig into a couple other great topics here for you today.

Steve Lewit: I think they’re all great. The AI is so controversial. There was another break-in, I guess you call it a break-in to some health information. Nothing personal, but AI got in there somehow and it took them six weeks to discover it and a lot going on in that area. It’s pretty interesting how the world will deal with it. It’s not just us, but it’s the rest of the world.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. So what was interesting about this article here, and what I wanted to share this with you is to give you, if you’re not sure, I’m learning more every week, but if you’re not sure how AI is being used, it’s harder to really wrap your arms around. So of course there’s lots of ways you can use AI from creating graphic designs to just a simple Q&A prompt instead of searching on Google for something. But what many people are doing and businesses are doing and where many businesses are claiming it’s the future is creating AI assistant bots or AI agents. And the concept is that these agents are supposed to, in theory, be able to replace real life workers.

Steve Lewit: Yeah. Well, I could use an agent sometimes.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, you’ll see, you’ll see, we’ll see. So this person who works for the website Wired, who wrote this article, the title here says, “I built AI clones of my coworkers. Things got weird.”

Steve Lewit: Yeah. Well, just building it sounds weird, but let’s dive in.

Gabriel Lewit: All right. Let’s unpack this a little bit. So what this fellow did is you can find Gemini, for example, is a common AI engine, if we’ll call it an engine. And then what you can do is you can create with that engine a clone of a human personality. So here’s the idea. Let’s say you have a boss and you normally would have your boss review things for you. So what you could do is you could feed this AI engine tons and tons of data. So you could upload two years worth of emails from your boss, for example, or thousands and thousands of chats if you have chats. You could even have the AI agent just research your boss on the internet to try to come up with a persona or a profile of what they think your boss would sound like if you were talking to it.

You with me so far?

Steve Lewit: And I know all that information is out there, folks.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, a lot of it’s out there. Some you might have to feed it personally if you otherwise kept it private. But the idea is that once you do this, this AI engine builds a persona or it’s almost like you’re talking to your boss, a person that talks to you the same way in theory your boss would talk to you. It’s supposed to try to replicate what your boss would think and how they would respond to you based on those previous data points and the type of personality it’s assessed your boss would be. And then it does all of this to supposedly help you do what? Become maybe more efficient. But that’s really the big question. So that all sounds fun and fine and dandy, but what does it actually do for you? So that’s what the goal of this article was trying to figure out. Does this make somebody a better worker?

They thought maybe I could submit articles ahead of time to my fake boss bot and it gives me better ideas. Maybe there’s X, Y, or Z things it’ll help me be faster at. That was sort of the hypothesis here that was behind this article, which I thought was interesting.

Steve Lewit: It does. And you know Gabriel, there are a lot of tests out there that do that to help you negotiate with your coworkers or bosses or spouses that, I forgot the name of them, like FINJ and all of those acronyms that tell you your personality. So theoretically it sounds like, well, that might be a really good idea.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. So here was this, the researcher or the writer’s opinions here was initially it was very fun, very interesting. It did start talking just like the boss would talk. So he actually created two boss bots or two different bots of different employees that he works regularly with. They would even talk to him in the same language, so kind of creepy, trying to make it seem more human-like versus technology. So yes, the human bot would talk to him like the boss would talk to him. It would use a similar languaging. It would use F-bombs if the boss swore, used some of the same phrases. And initially that seems great, except for bit by bit, what he found is that it was starting to repeat itself a lot, starting to sound more and more artificial as time went on.

And no matter how many times he would prompt it to try to start to talk different, it would still sound the same. It was an overly agreeable version of that same person because if you’re not aware, they build AI chatbots to be very, very agreeable. People like to talk to something that’s always telling them they have great ideas and good work and yeah, here’s what you could do. So it was interesting because what they ultimately concluded is that it really wasn’t very helpful.

Steve Lewit: After all that.

Gabriel Lewit: If you’ve used any AI prompt, if you’ve used any AI prompt, yes, it can come up with ideas. But the more and more you start using them, the more you start to distinguish between this is just something that’s been kind of regurgitated out there randomly versus a really, really well thought out idea. And I thought they came up with a great, I think, analogy in this article where the AI bots are like a canine companion for a police officer. So they’re there, they can do stuff for you, but they’re not really thinking.

Steve Lewit: It’s nice to have them around as pets, but you can’t really talk to them.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. And jobs are then turning into managing AI bots to do other things. Every time I see an article or not an article necessarily, even an advertisement on TV where, hey, you can just talk to your AI bot and it’ll book a haircut for you. And it’s just like they make it seem like it’s just AI book haircut and that’s all it is. But if you’ve ever tried to book a haircut in real life or whatever it is you’re trying to book, you call them, “Oh, that time’s busy.” “Okay, what about this time?” “Nope, they can’t do it then.” “Well, what about two weeks from…” “Oh yeah, let me go check and we’ll call you back.” These things can’t do all of these things for you. And when they do things, they do them only if it’s the easy route. I don’t know.

So I’m not like an AI maniac. I do use it for various things and I think there is absolutely more use cases for it. But I still, as I’ve often done on this show, continue to think that we’re going to see where this is really taking us here over the next year or two and what impact that will have to your finances, the stock market, how much money’s being poured into this. It’s really going to be interesting to continue to follow.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, a lot of tests out there on AI beating the market. All of those have failed. There’s a lot of money going into creating financial advisors through AI, which I think at some level might be helpful because AI has some good information or a lot of good information if you’re careful. I was reading an article this morning, Gabriel, about AI in your home, which is coming sooner than later. And I was making coffee this morning and I said, wonder what it would be like to have a robot standing there. And I said, “Robot, make me coffee.” And then I thought of that commercial where the Chase commercial, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, where the guy says, make me coffee without sugar and the robot pours sugar in it. And then he gets into a car to drive and the car says good morning and there’s nobody there.

And then he finally walks into a Chase bank and there’s a real person and he says, “Hi, I’m so happy to meet you.” I think it’s interesting. It’s also kind of weird, don’t you think? Well, think of what it’ll be like 20 years from today.

Gabriel Lewit: It definitely is going to be interesting and also weird. And I think people will get tired of talking to robots. I think already people are, and I think you’re going to see more of that. Obviously the world is committed to seemingly making robots a thing and happen and be prevalent in every aspect of our lives. But I think the more robotic and inhuman robots get, the more people will want to have real life human connection, my personal two cents. But it’ll remain interesting to see for sure. So anyway, so what does that have to do with your money? Well, if these things work out, there could be a lot of growth in business here. If these things bomb and people reject it, maybe all this money and investment slows down the pace, but we’ll see. We’ll see.

Steve Lewit: Yeah. Well, look, when you have a big company like Chase, they just place their bets and they’re saying we’re going human, not AI, which is really interesting to me. A lot of research went behind that. So like we said, we’ll see. It’ll be here, but we’ll see how far it goes.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, exactly. Now, let’s talk something a little bit more practical and in many ways the opposite of AI, and you’ll see why in a second, but six ways to get more happiness for your money is what we’re going to talk about next here. And what this is going to be focused on is ways that you can use your money to improve your happiness levels, which doesn’t that sound nice? What do you think, Steve?

Steve Lewit: Well, you would think, why do you need to talk to me about this, Gabriel? I know how to find happiness and what’s there to dig in here. You might say, “Why are we talking about this?” Right?

Gabriel Lewit: Well, that’s a great question. It’s because research has shown that spending money in different ways can raise or raise a lot higher your happiness level. In some cases, spending money doesn’t raise your happiness at all. And so if you have money to spend, which many of you are still in your savings modes, many of you are in retirement mode, many of you are in all sorts of different phases of life. But if we can be aware of how money could be used to improve your life happiness levels, I think we would all appreciate that. How do we make our money make us more happy? I don’t know if you’ve ever been… I don’t know. I’ve bought things in the past that I thought I was going to love and I couldn’t wait for it. And then all of a sudden I was like, “Eh.”

Steve Lewit: Yeah. Well, I’ve been on-

Gabriel Lewit: They didn’t move the needle much.

Steve Lewit: Have you been on vacations, Gabriel, where you say this is going to be the greatest vacation and it’s like, “Huh, not so great.”

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a great example. But let’s dive into this here because our job is yes, to help you make money and help you retire confidently and help you feel secure with your finances. But I also view our job as advisors and as holistic planners to help our clients live better lives. And money is a big component of that. And if we can help direct you towards things that will make you feel great, then that is 100% in line with what I’d like to do. Okay. So what do you think the very first thing on this list is, Dad, when it comes to how to spend money to get more happiness?

Steve Lewit: Well, when I think about spending money, for me, it’s not just having fun. It’s like I want to have a human experience. I want something that’s going to fill me up. And so that’s the first thing is I might go to a casino for fun, but I want something more fulfilling than that. So that’s kind of how I look at it.

Gabriel Lewit: So, you’re going to go take your money and buy a AI bot?

Steve Lewit: Well, you know-

Gabriel Lewit: I’m joking. I would be the opposite.

Steve Lewit: I wanted to buy an AI dog for the office, and you said no.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, that would be a less human experience, right? That would be more of a AI experience. Yeah. But funny enough, number one on the list of the research here was spending money on experiences versus possessions. And so, the examples given here is seeing a Broadway play, going to coffee with friends. These things make people substantially happier than buying possessions.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, I own this car. It’s great. I love it. But the big thrill goes the way where if I remember a play that I saw or a book that I read or something I wrote, those experiences stick with you and kind of feed you well long after the experience. Maybe even years later, it’s like you reflect on that and say, “Oh, I read that book. It was so great.” Or, “I went on that trip to Italy and remember the meal we had in that restaurant?” And those stick with you and I think are very rewarding.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. And researchers are trying to, because there’s overlap between those two, help distinguish between them because sometimes what’s a possession, right? Well, it’s something that you want to have, something you buy because you want to have the newest TV. For example, it could be a possession. An experience might be something you buy in order to do something and there’s no enduring possession after it. When you go see a play, there’s nothing you have tangibly afterwards other than the memory of it. And so sometimes there’s some crossover. If you happen to really enjoy driving fast cars and you buy yourself a really great sports car, well, that’s going to be giving you a lot of experiences, zooming around town perhaps within speed limit guidelines, Steve.

Steve Lewit: I have no idea who you’re talking about here.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Versus let’s say you’re on your 10th car and you’re just buying the car just to sit in your garage, maybe that’s not an experience so much anymore. But to expand upon this, number two was better yet spend money on experiences that you share with others. So they came out with some further research that says if you go out to dinner with friends, as an example, most people are happier than if they go out to dinner by themselves. Or if you go on vacation with multiple family members versus just you and your spouse, you’re creating greater experiences with others than just yourself and those tend to lead to greater happiness. And so, that’s something else you can think about. What can I do that I can then share with somebody else?

Steve Lewit: Yeah. So one of the predominant emotions that people have today, especially older folks, is loneliness. They don’t have friends or they eat dinner by themselves. And sometimes they have that loneliness, Gabriel, even if they’re in a group, they just don’t feel connected to human beings. So this is where, especially if you’re feeling lonely or disconnected, is to make an effort to spend your money where there are other people. Maybe you go to cooking classes where you’re going to go or yoga classes. So you make that connection with other human beings and that really helps offset those feelings of loneliness, which is a very dominant emotion here.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, no, definitely. Well, there’s also another option here. Number three on the list says spending money on other people other than yourself is really a key way of driving happiness. So for example, there’s a study done in 2008 where researchers gave participants $20 to spend on themselves or others on the same day. And people that spent that money on other people reported feeling substantially happier than the people that spent the $20 on themselves. And I think that’s a very interesting analysis there. So at the end of the day, spending on others, whatever that might mean for you, whether it’s something as simple as if you’re in line at the drive-through and this happened to me once, we went to pay for our meal at the drive-through and the teller said, “You’re covered. The car in front of you paid for it.” There’s a thing where people in drive-throughs will pay for the person behind them and just try to pass it forward.

And there’s reasons for that. We feel better when we do good deeds for other people often than when we just do things for ourselves. And so, it doesn’t have to be large. It could just be buying somebody else a meal just for no reason other than to do something nice and surprising them and making their day, or it could be something like sending your kid off to college or your grandchild off to college. Yeah, maybe doing something that’s for them other than for you.

Steve Lewit: I have forgotten this. I love this piece of this article, these little meritus acts like paying for somebody in the car behind you. I love this. You know what I’m going to do, Gabriel? I’m going to spend a month, every day I’m going to, and I’ll report back how it felt inside of doing this for a month.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, I’ll give an example. I mean, the other day I went out to breakfast with my family for brunch and I enjoyed breakfast with the family, of course. And then on the way out, there’s these two kids from a Boy Scout troop and they were selling popcorn. And would you believe it? Maybe you wouldn’t. The bags of popcorn were $20 a pop, so you weren’t buying it. You were basically making a donation with getting a little free popcorn on the side. And so, I bought a couple bags of popcorn and these kids were really cute. They came running over, big smile. “Hey, can you support us? Great cause.” And it was a nice day. And I felt really good afterwards doing something for the kids.

Steve Lewit: There was this whole movement that is still around called Random Acts of Kindness. And man, I can’t believe I stopped doing that. So this is folks get out there and do something for somebody else, buy them a cup of coffee or a sandwich or something.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Well, let me just read the last two here and then we can move on. Spend money on the right people. So they did say if you spend money on close relatives and family members, it tends to go a little further and be more meaningful than just a total stranger, although there’s benefits of both, of course. And people directly are usually better, you get more sense of fulfillment than donating to just a general charity, just an entity. You can also express your identity more through how you spend. If you understand what makes you tick, you can make your money go further, really learning about yourself along the way. And then the other interesting last cherry on the top here, the best way to cultivate happiness through spending is to not focus on spending so much in the first place.

The whole less is more, instead of more and more and more people just buy, buy, buy thinking it’s going to make them happier and happier. But if you can ironically and counterintuitively feel more comfortable with less, then you might actually find that when you do spend money on things, they mean even more for you.

Steve Lewit: Yeah. Especially in the US, we kind of move from one thing to another real quickly. We don’t really get into it and savor it or keep it for a long time. So I think that’s a wonderful one.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, there’s the right balance there. Yes, I’ve actually tried to do that with my coffee in the morning. I’ve learned that I just chug my coffee in the morning and then I go get another one. But soon I’ve had too many cups of coffee and I’m trying to sip it more slowly, but not too slow where it’s cold. You got to find the right balance between the speed of the sip and the temperature.

Steve Lewit: Gabriel, I hate to bring this to your attention, I’m sorry, but you can always warm your coffee up.

Gabriel Lewit: I mean, I’m in my office, the microwave’s a long walk away. I’m focused on doing work. Sure, you could. You certainly could.

Steve Lewit: I get it. I’m the same way. The coffee gets cold. It’s like I got to go get a new cup of coffee.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we have a couple listener questions here today that we wanted to get into, but before I switch gears there, if you have any questions on anything we’ve talked about here on what AI means for the stock market or your job security or your finances, we can chat with you on that. If you have questions on, Gabe, how do I spend my money on something that’ll make me happy? Can you give me some tips or how much money can I afford to spend? Call us. That’s what we’re here for to help guide you through. And you can reach us here anytime for a complimentary consultation or phone call at 847-499-3330 or go to sglfinancial.com, click contact us or email us info@sglfinancial.com. Now, we do have a listener question from Angelique. Angelique asked us, “Steve, I enjoyed today’s program. Perhaps you’d consider discussing what your clients investors do when they receive a prospectus online or in the mail. What key points should one look for?”

Steve Lewit: Angelique, it’s a great question, but I must tell you, when most of my clients receive a prospectus in the mail, guess what they do? They throw it out. They don’t even look at it. So that is the truth of what most people do. I think you’re asking, because it sounds like a more detailed person, is prospectuses are full of all kinds of information. How do you find what’s important in that A stack of just numbers and words and letters and acronyms that most people don’t understand?

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, I think you made a good point there, Steve, where many people just are like, “What is this?” And just chuck it out. It’s probably a good idea to attempt to do this very first step first, but identify if this is something you actually own.

Steve Lewit: Because you do own it.

Gabriel Lewit: Somehow, I’m still on some list somewhere where I’m getting stuff that’s completely unrelated to me. And that can happen in the investment world as well. You might be getting prospectus emails or mail on stuff that you owned 20 years ago that you don’t even own anymore, right?

Steve Lewit: Right.

Gabriel Lewit: Okay. So let’s say it’s a variable annuity. They give out prospectuses, mutual funds, ETFs, these have prospectuses. If you get a prospectus in the mail. Well, actually, can I tell you the very first thing I suggest if you work with a financial advisor is you email it to your financial advisor because we’ll give you some tips here for how to go through it. But if you’re unsure, just forward it to us and we could tell you very, very quickly, yes. Oh yeah, this is something you own and here’s what this means.

Steve Lewit: Yes. Yes, definitely. Definitely.

Gabriel Lewit: So we can actually try to make that really easy for you. Well, let’s say that you want to go through this on your own or you don’t want to forward it to your advisor. Well, if you’ve determined that it’s something that you do in fact own, the next thing you should be looking for is it talking about material changes? Oftentimes prospectuses are resent to you because something material has changed. The underlying fund holding or strategy has changed. The fees might have changed. The risks might have changed if it’s a real estate investment trust. There are different features of these that could change and you want to try to identify what’s the reason why they’re sending you this prospectus out of the blue.

Steve Lewit: Definitely. And by the way, folks, prospectuses for different products take on different forms, so it’s not as straightforward as saying, do this, do this, do that. But yeah, I would add to that. The other thing that I would look for, Gabriel, is what is the investment objective of the prospectus? What does it say that this product is trying to accomplish? And the reason I would look at that first is because I own it and I want to be sure that it fits my goal. So that would be one of the first things that I look for. And I think it’s the first four pages. I hate to admit this, but I haven’t read a prospectus in a long time, but I think the first four pages are the critical pages. And then you get into deeper things like debt, management experience, fees and expenses, of course, thinking portfolio turnover, all those details follow that.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. And if you’re not a really technical investment person, you’re going to read a lot of this and it’s going to seem like Greek or it might feel over your head or you may not know what it means or what was it like before. If something changed, the question, well, what was it before? And you may not know any of this. And so that’s why I do suggest that option of just sending this to your advisor because they should be able to help you make real clear sense of what this perspective is, why it’s being sent to you. That would always be my number one step. If you are, again, committed to doing this on your own, some people throw these things into AI and ask for summaries of the important points from them. You could do that. But just keep in mind, folks, AI does and is, as we talked about earlier, sometimes prone to making mistakes, and you still have to know what you’re ultimately looking at to be able to make good sense of it.

So yeah, let us know if you have a prospectus you don’t know what it means. We’re happy to help give you the plain English version.

Steve Lewit: So Angelique, I know you’re a reader, so I would say if I gave you four points to look for, what is the objective of the product, what strategy do they use? And then fees, of course, what are the fees inside? And do those fees apply to you because there could be fees that don’t apply to you. And then every prospectus has a section, I think I’m right here, Gabriel, on risks. These are the risks of this product. So those are the four categories I would probably look for.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Well, the last thing, and I want to say one thing here about today we talked about AI, and I meant to mention this earlier, and it was interesting, this just take one minute, but I had a client that signed up for something that provided him an AI summary, believe it or not, of annuity products. So they signed up for something that generated an AI summary of recommendations from annuities. And then that client took that AI summary and plugged it into his own AI asking it, and his AI came back and said that the other AI was wrong. And so what’s really funny about this world of AI is AI is now you start having it talk to each other and each one is regurgitating incorrect information. And so I do think us humans, folks, real advisors with real life experience and the ability to help you just understand something very, very simply with real life examples to attach to that is going to always count for something.

And Dad, I liked your example earlier of that Chase commercial. I think I view ourselves the same way. We want to be the human element to your financial plan. We want to be here to make your life easy and do so using real life experience, not just data that’s been regurgitated through the AI bots.

Steve Lewit: Yeah. And to understand who you are as a person, where you are in your life, do you have medical issues, your kids, graduation, grandkids? AI can’t package that humanly, at least not yet. I think we’re a long way from that, and that’s why humans are important.

Gabriel Lewit: Hopefully we stay important for a while. If we’re not, then that’s a bigger problem.

Steve Lewit: Well, the happiness article says we’re important.

Gabriel Lewit: Exactly, exactly. Well, folks, we are happy to have you on the show. Listening to us here, chatting and talking to you makes us happy. So if you’re happy, we’re happy. If there’s questions you have for us, give us a call anytime. If we can help with your finances, call us to set up an appointment. You can call us anytime, 847-499-3330 or email us info@sglfinancial.com and contact us on our website, www.sglfinancial.com. So we look forward to talking with you soon. Let us know how we can help. Otherwise, we’ll talk with you on the next show.

Steve Lewit: Stay well, everybody. We’ll see you.

Gabriel Lewit: Bye-bye.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Our 2 Cents with Steve and Gabriel Lewit. For any questions about your finances, give SGL a call at 847-499-3330. Or visit us on the web at sglfinancial.com and be sure to subscribe to join us on next week’s episode.

Disclosure: Investment advisory services are offered through SGL Financial, LLC, an SEC Registered Investment Adviser. Insurance and other financial products are offered separately through individually licensed and appointed agents.