Afford Anything - Is AI Making You Dumber? With Lorraine Marchand

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

#731: What if the best way to test a new hire wasn't a resume, but a two-hour breakfast? One CEO built his entire hiring process around it — and it worked. Lorraine Marchand spent three decades in leadership roles at companies like IBM, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and LabCorp, and interviewed more than 120 CEOs for her book on what actually makes teams innovate. Now she teaches at Wharton and Columbia Business School, and in this episode she joins Paula to share what really works. In this episode, we discuss: How one CEO used a casual team breakfast to test whether a new hire was the right fit before they came on board A simple three-question test to figure out if a bad job culture is fixable, or if it's time to start looking elsewhere Why a weekly 30-minute habit of talking about what's not working can make a team stronger How to network your way into opportunities early in your career, even if you're worried AI will replace you first What new research on memory loss and heavy AI use means for how you should be using these tools How to protect your job in your 50s and 60s as companies push AI adoption on everyone Where Marchand thinks the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunity is actually hiding (hint: it's not another app) Whether you're building a team from scratch, trying to decide if a toxic job is worth fixing, or just trying to use AI without losing your edge, this episode gives you practical takeaways you can put to use right away. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS Note: Timestamps may vary slightly depending on dynamic ad placements. (02:00) – The team breakfast test: how one CEO used a shared meal to hire the right people (17:38) Should you try to fix a bad culture, or start looking for a new job? (26:29) Why people follow good bosses, not companies (28:26) Networking advice for people early in their career (30:25) What heavy AI use might be doing to your memory and thinking (31:06) AI job displacement and the skills worth building now (50:56) Using AI as a thought partner to build emotional intelligence (58:23) Advice for workers in their 50s and 60s worried about AI and ageism (1:06:00) Building a team of humans and AI "agents" — including an AI board of directors (1:14:43) Where Marchand sees the next wave of entrepreneurship and innovation heading 🔗 RESOURCES MENTIONED THE SIMPLE THREE-STEP PROCESS THAT CHANGES HOW YOU THINK ABOUT EVERYTHING 👉https://affordanything.com/turnitaround  Landit – The AI-powered interview and communication prep tool mentioned in the episode 👉 https://www.landitinterview.ai/ Lorraine Marchand's website 👉 https://www.lorrainemarchand.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today you're going to hear straight talk about the job market. You'll find out why blasting out 500 online applications is a losing game. And what actually gets you hired instead. You're going to find out what to do if you're building something. How do you, as a small company, create a company culture, if you're a group of two or three people, and you're going to learn a very useful framework for using AI without letting it rot your brain. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship.

It's double-eye fire. I'm your host, Paula Pan, I trained in economic reporting at Columbia, and today's guest is Lorraine Marchand, an adjunct professor of management at Columbia Business School and a lecturer at the Wharton School. She also was the James Wee visiting professor of entrepreneurship at Princeton, and she's built courses on accelerating the commercialization of new technologies for both Princeton and Yeshiva University. She's co-founded four companies. She advises Fortune 500 companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis. And her latest book is called No Fear, No Failure, for which she interviewed roughly 120 CEOs for her research on what actually makes companies

work. Today's episode is all about in the F-I-I-R-E framework, It is about that letter E, entrepreneurship. So if you're building anything, whether it's a side hustle or a bootstrap business, she gets granular on what to do, especially when you're just getting started. If you are not interested in starting a business, if you are looking for a job, we talk about best and worst practices. I think you'll find this conversation highly useful. Enjoy.

Hi, Lorraine. Tell us about the importance of a business. pancake breakfast. The pancake breakfast is about being in an organization where you need to create a ritual that reflects your culture and your values, but it has to be done in a really practical way, something that everybody understands that give us insights into how the team's going to function together, how people are going to get along. So what I mean by that is in the particular example that I have, there was a young and up-and-coming CEO, Silicon Valley. He had an interesting idea for a digital supply chain company. At the time, he only had 35 employees. They would get together

every time they had a new employee that they interviewed, they'd have breakfast over pancakes for two and three hours in order to get to know the person. And because it was in that kind of informal setting, they could talk about the type of pancake the person liked, the syrup. It was really relaxed. They learned a lot about that individual and whether they had the right vibe and the right style and fit for the company. After the pancake breakfast, the team would get together and decide yay or nay on this person. Did they pass the pancake breakfast test? As the company expanded, they moved into Korea, China, and other domains. The CEO was trying very hard to hold onto the fabric of this ritual and train other people in the company how to use it. So we got this call one morning

from his counterpart in China. And he said, you know what? I want to find out if this is okay. We're going to have a dumpling breakfast today. And I want to make sure that that's okay and similar enough to the pancake breakfast that I can use it and I can make a decision about hiring the next person for the company from it. And Dave just cracked up laughing. And he was like, I don't care if you have pancakes or dumplings or waffles or whatever the food is. It's like around creating that shared experience and bringing enough of the company together that you're having a casual conversation and you're figuring out whether there's chemistry with the people that you're bringing into the organization.

I think that's the operative word here. You need to figure out if the chemistry is right when you're working with the team of people, particularly if you're going out on your startup for the first time, or even if you're in a going concern and you're on a new team, it all comes down to that local group of people and can you work together, make things happen and have fun? They see people do not leave companies. They leave the direct manager. So the pancake breakfast is a really good way of learning early on whether you've got the right fit, you know, the old adage. Yeah. Higher slow, fire fast. So Dave has a had very few terminations in his long career. They were just acquired actually last year by a

Japanese corporation. Really interesting guy and a great story. Yeah, it's true. People don't leave companies. They leave bad bosses. Yes. A lot of people who are listening to this are entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, but their business will be entirely online. In fact, for many people, the whole purpose of wanting to become an entrepreneur is that they want the freedom of remote work. But with the freedom of remote work comes the loneliness of remote work, the inability to get a bunch of people in a room together to eat pancakes or dumplings. How does this translate to that? Well, I think it's a really good question to ponder today. I mean, whether you're trying to get your team together for a pancake breakfast, whether you're trying to do your customer

research, we're all relegated to digital means now. And I think the best thing to try to accomplish, number one is some kind of a hybrid. Even if you're a single entrepreneur, even if your business is digital, number one rule, it's really important to get out there with people and still create a physical network, activities that you can go to, people that you can have breakfast with, and figure out the ways where you can also engage with your team members. So that's the first part. I would never suggest that somebody go completely digital because I think that the hybrid approach is best. I think that we still need high touch with high tech. And if you can combine those two pieces, it's really powerful.

As far as how to create a digital experience with your team members, I've tried a lot of different things. So I've had happy hour with my team, a digital happy hour. So we all get together. We're on the Zoom. and everybody has brought their favorite drink and their favorite snack. We kind of go around, talk about what we're eating, what we're drinking. That has pandemic vibes. Yeah, yeah, it has a pandemic vibe.

And we have the chat that way. I've also been in team building exercises where, for example, there's a New York cheese shop. And we did a nationwide remote meeting, team building session. Everybody got their cheese and their beverage sent to them. And then we tried the cheese. We had a sommelier. and the cheese expert sitting in the middle of the Zoom. And, you know, just as best we could.

We chatted with each other, you know, via the Zoom screen. And we tried to make it as natural and fun and conversation as possible. I do think that people are a lot more comfortable on camera than they've ever been. When we first had to do COVID, it was really awkward for people. I mean, in my company, you'd go on Zoom, but you would not turn your camera on. Nobody would. You just use the audio. Right. Yeah, I remember those days. Yeah. Actually, my team, so pre-pandemic, my team would get on Zoom and it would be camera off. Yeah. And now that I think about it, it was probably during the pandemic. Yeah. And we all started turning cameras on. People were completely comfortable. And I remember asking a colleague, because we had our cameras off, we just used an audio and was like, oh, well, John, I'm just kind of curious. What are you wearing since you don't have to be on camera? And he's like, I am wearing my favorite ugly Hawaiian shirt. Would you like to see it? And he'd

They're just camera on. And then we kind of just started something like that. Oh, well, let's do that. Now, you would apologize if you got on a meeting and your camera wasn't on. You're apologizing, right? Right. Oh, my camera's not on today. I'm having Wi-Fi.

You're really just having a bad hair day. But you're just telling everybody, right, that your Wi-Fi is not working. So I think that we've gotten a lot more comfortable, right? People have customized backgrounds and they dress, however they like to dress in order to be on digital. So we've gotten a lot more comfortable with that and we figure out ways to kind of remove the physical boundaries and even the artificiality of the camera and trying to have as real experience as possible. I think I've also noticed that business meetings usually start with more socialization than they would if I was meeting in person. So if I'm going to meet in person, we might get to business right away to be very efficient for each other's time because we're together, et cetera. But when you're in a Zoom meeting, it's just natural that you kind of go around, check in on everybody, how you're doing, how you're feeling.

And I think that's a good thing that we spend a little bit more time socializing at the beginning of the meeting than we might. So I think there are certain things that are more advantageous. It certainly makes it a lot more efficient. You can meet faster, sooner than you could during the days when you had to hop on a plane and meet in person. I think we have to take advantage of the dynamic nature that it allows, the flexibility, and it being very, very personal, right? Because you're going in – I mean, sometimes I've been on a Zoom and somebody's sitting in their hotel room with their bed and their pillows in the background. That's a pretty personal setting to be seeing someone, right? But we're okay with that.

well, she's traveling and she's sitting on her bed trying to join the Zoom call. So I think it allows us maybe to be more vulnerable and human than we would in the dress-up go to the meeting kind of world. And I think we should take advantage of that. In the context of innovation, many people often use the word startup and the term innovation, almost interchangeably. The assumption is that these two words pair together. In your research, you found that startups can be stodgy. Can you talk about that? Yes. I've done what I call archetypes of companies. And so I've got the startup, I've got the emerging adolescent, I've got the growth company, and I've got the bureaucracy.

Yeah. In my research, because I interviewed about 120 CEOs of all ilks, I found that the startup, even though we associate it with being innovative and entrepreneurial, might be fashioned to be stodgy if in fact it's been designed around raising money from venture capital and bringing in a former executive team from a similar type of industry or corporate setting. So for example, if I want to do a startup in a new drug field, a therapy, but I decide that I'm going to raise all this VC capital that's going to professionalize us and make sure we've got capital to build the company. And now I go over to Pfizer and I bring in the X drug development team from Pfizer and I put those things together what's going to happen on day one. I'm going to bring the stodgy corporate mindset of a Pfizer

into this startup with all the pressures of VCs as shareholders and board members and you're looking for results. And I'm going to kill the innovation and the entrepreneurship on day one because I've actually designed the whole experience to be more like a corporate stodgy bureaucracy. Now, I personally recommend that people wait as long as possible before they have to get any kind of commercial capital. And so I really believe in bootstrapping. I like that. And that kind of hearkening back to Dave, who we talked about with the pancake breakfast, it allows you a lot more control over your company, over your direction to create things that are a little bit more ritualistic like a pancake breakfast and make sure that the company is forming in a way that feels really

natural and authentic to you because only the CEO can shape the culture. The CEO should be shaping the values on the culture. Like that's the most important thing that you're doing. You can find a lot of technical people to build and deliver whatever it is you want to build and deliver. but only you can set the direction, the culture, the values, the behaviors, the ritual. And as a CEO, you want to keep a close hand on that. Right. I'm imagining somebody who's listening to this who is working with a very small team, like an entrepreneur.

Maybe they're running a side hustle while they still have a W-2 job, but they're hoping that the side hustle one day becomes a full-time thing. Or maybe they've made that transition. And now it's a full-time thing, but they've got a team. of two or three or four, how do you set culture in a group that's that small? Well, when it's that small, it's probably a lot easier to set the culture, but you have very explicit conversations about it. Not that you're weird and get on the Zoom and say, oh, we're going to talk about culture today, but you come up with whatever your, I'll call them

guiding principles, but you use your own moniker for it. Like, these are the four things that are really important to me in the company. And these are the four things that we're going to make sure we do as a leadership team. We're going to keep people accountable. If we find that something is slipping, we're going to get together. We're going to have an open discussion about it. We're going to call each other out. No hurt feelings. We're just going to be really candid, open and honest, because it's in the best interest of the business. And we don't want bad feelings to start to accumulate. So honesty, openness, integrity are super important. Maybe in this idea of we don't want to fear failure, because when you're in a startup, you are going to make mistakes. You just are.

Things are not going to go according to plan. Right. Did your first company go according to plan? No. No. No, not at all. None of mine have. Okay. None of them have. As a human being, all we can really do is reframe those things that don't go well, what we might call failure, pivot, use them as learning experiences, and keep moving forward. One of the rituals that I had, like kind of akin to Dave's pancake breakfast, I had something called Failure-Free Fridays. I would get just a four-person team together, and I'd say, okay, today we're going to talk about what's not working. We're not going to solve for it. We're just going to make sure that we're keeping the lines of communication open, and we're talking about it. We're never shoving it under the

rug. We know that we're in a safe space with each other as a team, and we have to be able to talk about what's not going well, because in a startup, in entrepreneurship, things are not always going to go well. And you don't want people right off the gate to feel as though they have to hide something from the CEO because you don't want to hear bad news. So don't be that guy. Don't be the kind of guy who doesn't allow people to bring you news you don't want to hear. Right. So it requires a certain amount of intellectual curiosity, courage and fortitude to know where your blind spots are and to make sure that you also let the team know that and how it is

you want them to behave with you. Right. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is wanting to figure out how to guide our Monday and Friday meetings, something a little bit more sophisticated. than simply, what's the focus for the week and did we do the thing? Right? And so for Fridays, a big picture of what's not working in addition to like celebrate the wins.

Yes. Yes. And you should definitely celebrate the wins. I'm only recommending like the failure free Friday for 30 minutes. But it's an important companion. Right. To celebrating the wins. Because in a way, like how do you know how big the win was if you don't know how big the

problems were, the things that the team had to. overcome. So I find that it was really liberating for team members. I even had somebody tell me one time because we had to go into a larger meeting. And I said, okay, you know what? When we go into the meeting, you're going to need to talk about this. That feels really scary to me because like when I'm sitting here talking to you, it feels like a really safe space. I feel very calm. I can explain it. But when I get in the larger corporate meeting, I clam up. I start to feel nervous. They throw questions at me. They start interrogating me. And I just get really afraid. So I said, well, we're going to have to dismiss that fear. And you're going to have to put yourself in the place

that we are, where we practice this, and stay in control of your composure. And she did a great job. Nice. Some of the people who are listening to this are currently working at companies, frankly, that they hate. And the culture sucks. They feel constrained in their jobs. Maybe they're micromanaged. Maybe they don't have the authority that they need in order to do the thing that they want. Do they quit or do they try to make it better while they're there? We'll start with even should they try to fix it before we go into how could they? Yeah. Get that question a lot. Should they try to fix it? I usually ask people a few questions to help them do a diagnosis of the situation. Okay. First of all, one of the questions at the highest level is, what happened to the last person who failed in the company? Have you seen people get let go when projects didn't go well or they didn't have a good outcome? Like, that's question number one, because that tells you how the company operates at the highest level and what the culture is and what the tolerance for failure is. So that's really important to understand.

Then if you bring it down, you want to know a little bit more about the problem. their local manager. How does your manager handle it when things don't go as planned? Do they have your back? Do they sit and talk with you? Do they take some accountability with their manager with what didn't go as planned? So how much can you trust that person? And then what kind of culture are they creating on your team? Are you taking time to talk about problems or what didn't go well or what you can learn from it. So you kind of have to do that organizational analysis at those levels. Clearly, if the answer is no on all three of them, you're highly unlikely to be able to make a change. I suggest that you do that Porter forced analysis and you may have to make other plans

if you're just in an environment where at all levels there's just not a tolerance for failure, a focus on growth. I would say. if you're in a company where the answer to that first question is, no, they don't deal well with failure, but my local manager is like really cool. We talk about things. In fact, this happened last week at a large company. A woman had tried a project, gone out on a limb, tried something that was risky. It didn't work out. And she said, oh, yeah, they're very tolerant of a failure here. It didn't work out, but I didn't get fired. They just didn't get. They just didn't get. me my bonus. And I said, well, don't you think that that was a negative way of rewarding you,

that you didn't get a bonus? Oh, thank you very much for not firing me, but we didn't give you a bonus. So that is a negative message, right? They didn't really tolerate what you did because they kept you around, but they didn't give you your bonus. She said, wow, I didn't really think about it that way. I don't want to be that person. What can I do? And I'm And I said, well, that's great that you want to be the kind of leader with your team that can emulate this not fearing failure and encouraging. So then we, you know, we were able to talk about that. And she's taken a number of steps to having fail-free Fridays and getting together with the team more frequently and very much supporting them and encouraging more problem-solving, critical thinking, at least in her own team. So if you're on her team, I would stay.

You've got a good boss. They've got your back. You're going to be trying some things and you can at least make a go of it. And that goes back to what you said earlier about people, people don't quit jobs. They quit bad bosses. So if the local manager is solid. If the person that you're directly reporting to is solid, then you've got a chance. Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you, Paula, because I've got a long view now, but how often I go into companies to do consulting. And I'll find out that half of the senior team have all worked to. together before. Okay? And that's because you follow people, not companies, not roles, not jobs, people follow other people. So if you've got a great boss and they've made it work for you, you know, when the time comes and you do move on and you have an opportunity to work with that boss in the future, you probably will decide that you want to do that. And the nice thing about that is you have a trust factor going in. You don't have to start all over building trust and

behaviors and rituals with that person because you already have a working experience. So I think it's really important to value the people that you work with over the company or that particular environment. So follow good people. Some people who are listening to this are relatively new in their careers. They don't yet have people. They don't have a network of people that they have worked with, and they're also worried about AI job displacement, what's to keep a robot from replacing them, essentially. What would you say to those people who are listening to this? Well, number one, networking with people is super important because even though we have to worry about AI displacement, we still know that 90% of jobs come through personal connections.

I know somebody, and I bring them in for the interview, it's not because you sent five indeed resumes out. Stop doing that. You're wasting your time. And don't get down when you don't get any responses because the AI tool is designed to screen you out

because nobody can possibly evaluate 500 resumes. So it's very important to get out and to meet people. A lot of times people that are early in their career will say to me, well, okay, I'll go to the networking event

or whatever it is, but I don't know what to say. I don't have anything interesting to say to this person. person. Like this is some big wig from J.P. Morgan Bank. What do I say to them? And I say, well, what is everybody's favorite topic? And they usually get that right. And they say themselves. And I say, good. Then you're going to start off asking them one or two questions about themselves and listen very closely until you find some thread of commonality where you can jump in and say,

oh yeah, I like the Knicks too. I was at the game last week. You find some level of commonality. and you start to build rapport around that. If you get the person talking for 30 minutes, you'll find something, usually, that's a thread that you can latch onto. And then, you know, your purpose is just to meet them for the first time, send out a thank you note, ask if there's anybody else that they recommend that you meet because you're early in your career and you're building a nice network of people that you want to be able to call on. And usually people are very flattered by that and willing to help somebody.

that's more junior in your career. But you can't be afraid. You know, it does take a certain amount of courage and you have to put yourself out there. The other thing that I found is helpful is sometimes people are surprised that truly their own network is more powerful than they ever realized.

So what I mean by that is, okay, you graduated two years ago, et cetera, but have you looked at who the parents are of some of your friends? I mean, I've had a lot of people come to me through their children saying, oh, why don't you talk to, of course I'll talk to somebody. So you have to think about your network a little bit more broadly. It's like that Kevin Bacon's six degrees of separation. It's not just that person, but who does that person know that might

be able to introduce you? And I think it's also about networking with non-traditional people. It's been proven that this is an issue with the way women network. And it's why women entrepreneurs sometimes find it harder to get up and running because they network with women from their own industry, their own sector. If I come out of marketing, I'm networking with other women marketers. And I'm not thinking, well, if I'm going to do something entrepreneurial, I need to know attorneys. I need to know finance people. I need to know accountants, right? I'm going to need to know people from other walks that I might not naturally network with because I'm going to rely on these people to help me run other aspects of my business. So I say think a little bit more broadly. Don't just network in your lane. Think about

those people in other adjacent fields and sectors that could be very interesting. And because they have a whole new pod, they're going to be much more effective at helping to introduce you to people in their network as opposed to keeping that network pod that you're in too constrained. Right. On the subject of AI, so you and I were chatting before we started recording, about cognitive decline, regardless of age, cognitive decline even in young people as a result of over-reliance on computerized tools, even going all the way back to the calculator. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So I think it's a fascinating area. What got me interested in it was there was a Forbes article, and it was titled, AI may be making you faster, but it's making you faster. But it's making

you dumber. I read the article and then I just started doing my own research and I saw that IQ scores have steadily declined since 1970 when the calculator came on the scene to do math for us, particularly in like high school students and undergrad. They're starting to see these cognitive declines that are coming from using social media tech and now AI so frequently. What happens is they're calling it digital dementia. So you literally have this forgetfulness. or these memory gaps that are caused by your digital device for a few different reasons. Number one, we all have to agree that we're distracted. Right.

So if we're sitting at dinner or lunch and we're talking to somebody and all of a sudden we've gotten a notification and we've turned our attention to it, we probably have lost a good minute or two of whatever we were having that conversation about. So we get distracted. So that causes gaps. Number two, it creates a level of passivity in our brain. The brain hemispheres, the first thing, the brain hemispheres, the first thing,

front and the back and the cortex, et cetera, they have to communicate with each other. That's how information gets passed from one side of the brain to the other and retained. And when you don't have a true understanding of a subject matter and you're not truly wrestling with it or thinking about it and putting it into practice, your brain doesn't retain it. So it's become very popular for people to think, well, I don't really need that factoid or that piece of information or to know when something happened in history, because I can easily look it up again. If you do that, then you also are kind of cheating your brain on the experience of reading about something, wrestling with it, and committing it to memory, and you're causing this passivity and this digital dementia,

and your mind isn't actually processing. So the data is showing that, for example, in those two things alone, it's causing this cognitive decline. So then you say, you fast forward and you look at the trillion-dollar TAM on workforce transformation and companies, particularly corporations that are now forcing employees to use AI. So for example, I was talking with a woman who was a computer engineer at Cornell. She's now at Amazon. She has a job. She's not doing her coding job anymore. She's been told to write prompts, and she has to use AI to do her job every day. And she's been told that probably within two years, the AI is going to completely do her job autonomously, and she's not going to have a role at the company anymore.

Wow. She's been directly told that. Yeah. So you did ask. I'll just jump to that for just a moment. Then you say, well, what can I do about those situations? Some of what I see is, again, it comes back to developing those interpersonal skills, communication, leadership, you know, sort of what they're calling this durable skills stack.

And there are schools now that are thinking about what are the durable skills that you need in order to function in any kind of work environment, you know, AI aside. And there's still going to be interpersonal relationships. There's still going to be communication, critical thinking. So focus on building up those personal and intelligent, human intelligence skills. And I find that a lot of times young people in particular, companies are not giving them that kind of development. They're just seen in a technical role and they're not building up their leadership, their technical skills. So I think you're going to have to seek it on your own.

And then the other thing is you should think about industries where they're not AI native and they need young people who understand AI to come in and help them do their planning and their building. So for example, if you think about health care, if you think about the pharma industry, their core competency is developing. drugs and helping people get well. They don't have centers of excellence in AI, and they're very much interested in bringing in young talent who get it really fast and can help them plan and design things. So move yourself into some kind of industry sector where they need your skill set, and there are 100 computer engineers or prompt engineers running around in the building. So I think there are things that individuals can do. Going back to the human intelligence and human capital, the durable skill stack of leadership, of empathy, these things that were

once considered soft skills, which are now increasingly important. This is sort of the first time in, at least in my lifetime, that the quote unquote, soft skills are now being taken seriously and are now being prioritized more than the hard skills or the technical skills. But to circle back to our earlier conversation about remote work, it can be more difficult both to develop soft skills as well as to iterate and implement and improve when work is remote. Everything is through a digitized layer now.

I think it means that as a communicator, you have to work harder. Back in the day, if you had a phone interview, you had to prepare yourself and execute that phone interview with all the enthusiasm as if you, you were in person, right? So we're used to doing that. I mean, I'm used to doing that. Like, you do a sales pitch. You had to get on the phone sometimes and do your sales pitch and be really animated and pitch the product over the phone. Well, now we have the benefit of video, but we have to do the same thing through the video screen. Those soft skills, you know, being able to read a room. Now you have to read the room through the Zoom screen. Like, what is that person looking at? Oh, that one's on their phone scrolling. That person's got a frown

on her face. In a way, you have this captive audience and you can actually read the room a lot easier now in a Zoom meeting than you ever could if you were staring at somebody across the conference room table. I think there are certain advantages to remote work or a remote meeting where I can maybe kind of tune in with somebody a little bit faster and better because they're unguarded to some extent and I can read their faces and their expressions. I think that can be an advantage. But you have to work a little harder because you do have that digital filter. And so you have to make sure that your voice is carrying, that your lighting is good, that you're dressed in the appropriate colors, that your energy is coming through, that you're showing a little bit of hand motion. So maybe we have

to be a little bit more like we're actors because of that on the stage. But I think you have to play to the medium and you have to come alive more. Right. So you're right. Somebody who's got a really low-key personality that does well in a personal situation because I can feel their earnestness. You know, like he's really low-key, but I feel his earnestness here. Might just come off as really boring or not confident if it's only the Zoom layer. So I think it requires a lot more emotional intelligence around the situation that we're in. And there are tools now that can prepare you for this. So there's a tool that can prepare you for interviews.

You can actually do a mock interview. It'll give you your voice inflection. It'll tell you how fast you're speaking. It'll tell you if your voice sounds positive or negative on different words and you can try it again. It'll render your lighting, is your lighting right? Is your coloring right? So there's a lot of technology now that can help you perform better in a digital meeting situation. What is the interview tool called?

One of them is called Landit, but there are a number of other tools available. Landed IT is starting to be distributed and used in colleges because they realize that so many students have to do their interviews on Zoom now. Right. And they didn't know how to prepare their background. They didn't how to speak. So, yeah, I think it just helps us to develop a whole new set of competencies. Right.

So we have to embrace that. Like that's the innovative part of learning to be flexible, dynamic, resilient human beings and adjusting ourselves to the situation. As opposed to saying, wow, that's really hard and difficult now. We say, well, there are advantages to it and how do I make it work for me? What do you do if you're in a work environment where there is a culture that is largely asynchronous or where people insist on a lot of asynchrony? And so you end up modulating through primarily email or Slack.

That's a difficult situation. And I think particularly early in your career, it can be tough. Like I would say that there's definitely a generational divide on that question. If you talk to people that have families, for example, and they really dig working from home, you know, they're complaining if they have to even go in a day or two a week. and they love the fact that they can be off camera, get up in the morning, have their coffee, after they've worked out, stay off camera all day, do stuff on email and stuff. They're loving it. I mean, they've grown up knowing what it's like to have interpersonal skills and be in an office and communicate.

And so to some extent, they've got those skills well honed. They know when to pick up the phone. They know when to go in the person in the meeting. They're perfectly happy and they can pretty much interact very efficiently through electronic means. But if you skew earlier in your career, like the post-COVID folks that came out of school and now they're at EY and they're all in their home office and they can't learn, they can't train, they're not going to happy hour. That's really tough because you never had an opportunity to develop those social skills and learn what it's like to interact with people or go to a happy hour and so forth. So what I've seen is, it's not exactly an answer to your question. For example, I teach sophomores at Wharton. They absolutely abhor anything digital. They want to go to the office. They don't want to be on Zoom meetings. No, I'm going to meet the people. I'm going to the networking event. I want to go to the office. And they're big advocates for trying to do things in person because they somehow kind of feel cheated that they never had that opportunity to develop social social. skills. So I think if you're stuck in one of those situations, I would recommend that you find all means possible to you to create the personal relationships. So if it means going in the office

and scheduling some one-on-ones with other people in the company so you can grow your network, planning a lunch, making sure you go to happy hour, you'll have to do well with the email and the slack. Yeah. But I think it's incumbent upon the person to try to develop some of those more personal relationships. Yeah. We as a company have tried so hard to develop an in-person team. And in our hiring, we've tried to narrow our hiring to only a limited, you know, must be in person. And it curtails hiring so much because now you're looking at a much smaller sample size. Yes. And then because so much of hiring is through referral networks, inevitably what ends up happening is we go through a bunch of job candidates that are local, we don't like any of.

them, but then we get a referral to somebody who is remote, but they're excellent. And so we're like, all right, well, we're hiring them because they're so good. So then we accidentally just keep growing a remote tea. It's like a whole thing. Yeah. Well, do you get together on a regular basis? In person? No, never. Oh, never. Because I do think that at least once a quarter, getting everybody together for dinner and a meeting can be a positive way, just to make sure that people have seen each other. I mean, I did work for a couple of years at IBM, and I never saw my boss because it was during COVID. I never met anybody. Somehow, we just ended up making relationships, because like I said, I think we were already kind of wired that way that it worked out.

But I think trying to find those opportunities to get together with people in person, a lot of companies will try to do that, even if it's just a day or two. Yeah. I would like that. It requires quite a bit of cost and logistics. Yes. And, coordination. But I think people are getting more and more comfortable with it. And as long as they are and they do their jobs well and you're okay with, I mean, I do think there's a certain amount of flexibility that's really attractive. Some people might be afternoon people and they like working till 7 o'clock at night. And other people might be morning people. And so I do think it allows us to take advantage of our peak performance and productivity periods, you know. Right. Yeah. But back to, I want one more thing about AI. in this research that I've done, things that you can do to help to avert some of the cognitive decline, particularly with AI, because I think there's a lot that's being done now. You know, TikTok has screen time notifications, and there are things where people can design tools and techniques to be more mindful of social media.

But on the AI front, it's really important that people, learn to use it correctly. So what I mean by that, if you can use AI as what I might call a sparring partner, a thought partner, it can actually help you get smarter, right? And so what that means is, if you have a question, something that you're working on, you take a first stab at a hypothesis. You do your own independent thinking about it. Maybe you even write something down. And then you say to AI, this is my thought process, this is my objective, this is my hypothesis, this is what I want to do, poke holes in it. Tell me everything that's wrong with the way I'm thinking about this. Show me where I'm too limited and how I'm thinking about it. Give me a good counter argument,

like push back on me. That's a great way to use AI as a replacement for a teacher, a coworker, a boss who you don't have access to at that moment, that you might have the very same conversation. So for example, if somebody walks in your room office and you give them an assignment, you're not just going to ask them to intuit what the assignment is. You say, here's the assignment. Here's our objective. Here's what I want you to do. This is what I want the outcome to be.

This is how long it's going to take. You know, go out and do your assignment. You're going to give them some instruction on how to do that assignment, right? So we have to think about AI in the same way. What kind of instructions do you want to give the AI and then how do you want to use them in order to make sure that your thought process is further than what you can accomplish on your own. And that's really different from somebody going into chat and just asking a question completely unaided and just waiting for it to regurgitate things for you or putting an assignment in chat and then

turning it in and it's not your work. So it goes from being using it as more of a thought partner to question and challenge yourself and using it less as just a passive tool to do, your work for you, and it's easy to see between the lazy use of chat, which you're not going to get smarter, you are going to have cognitive decline, and people are going to be able to see that you've done that versus using it as a thought partner and having all those prompts in order to show your thought process. And for example, what we do at Wharton, you are encouraged to use AI. When you use AI, you actually turn in all of your prompts. So now I can see your whole thought process. Wow. What you were thinking, what you asked AI, what it responded, what you said

back. And if I can see like an almost an hour worth of discussion, I'm like, okay, this person used AI intelligently. They got a good result from it, and they definitely worked their brain and kept thinking through something, and they used AI as a thought partner. So that's very powerful and positive. Right, right. Yeah, I had some very long back and forths with AI that have to help me develop better theory of mind, the ability to understand the world through the perspective of somebody else. I actually specifically asked AI to help me develop the skill set of high theory of mind. Okay.

There you go. And what did it tell you? We just workshoped through some questions. It kind of gave me some information about how somebody else might be viewing a situation. There was a particular problem that I was trying to solve. I discussed that problem with someone and she gave me advice that intuitively my feeling was that's not right, but I couldn't articulate why. And when I chatted about it with chat, chat really highlighted how her advice was couched in her intent, but it had no regard for how it would land with the other person. So she was judging herself by her own intentions, but was not thinking about the implicit task or role that the execution of her advice would place upon the other person.

And so chat kind of then helped highlight, all right, if you were to do that, this is the implicit role that you're assigning to that person and this is the implicit task that comes from that role. And is that what you are intending? Yes or no? you know? Yeah, so it can help you broaden your impression of something, right, perspective on something from just one view. So I think that's really healthy. And you're not turning that in anywhere, right? I mean, you just used it to think through. And I think that's a great example of it. I think we'd love to see people doing that more. The one thing to be aware of with all of the AI, especially since it's also new and it can hallucinate. But it also wants to. to please you. So you might have noticed if you ask AI a question, oh, that's a really great question. I'm really glad you, you know, that's a really cool question that you asked and here are my thoughts on it. And so you actually have to train the AI to push back. Yeah. Well, I don't want to hear that you thought that was a great question. Tell me all the things that were wrong with my question or everything

that's wrong with the way I'm thinking or how would these other three roles or people view that same situation. So you really do have to tune the AI up to bring you other perspectives and to also understand what it is you're looking for. Right, right. I prompt it to not be sycophantic. Okay. Yeah. That's good. And the other thing is there are the five different AI are actually matched for different kinds of use cases. There's been some interesting, I can send you an infographic on that. I'll send it to you. Yeah, it's really interesting. Oh, okay. We'll put that in the YouTube video. Yeah, like these are the best use cases when you're using chat, and this is how it's used best. Here's Claude, and this is what you want to use Claude for.

Here's Gemini. Here's how you use it. Because there's really only five that people are using right now. Right. So I'll make sure I send you that infographic because I think that's super interesting. Oh, okay. Interesting. Yeah, we'll put it in the video and we'll have a link where we can share it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think what corporations are doing now because nobody really understands where, AI is going or how to use it. And so what I'm seeing, maybe for your folks that are working in large corporations, there seem to be two models. Either there's a central model where they spend $40 million on Google or Anthropic or name your favorite interface. And they say, okay, here everybody, you have to use this and you have to prove that you have 10 to 20 percent improvement in your efficiency, timeline productivity, because you've used this tool when we spent

lot of money on it, you know, go at it. Or I'm seeing things that are more decentralized at the bottom where they say, okay, each individual just go out and find your favorite tool, we'll pay for it, play around with it, and see what you can accomplish with it. I think both of them are really foolish because it means that, first of all, you're spending a lot of money to bring a tool in and you're just having people play with it without any particular goal or purpose. in mind, when just like anything else that you do in business, everything has to start with some kind of strategic intent, a problem that we're solving, a use case that we want to test, and some parameters about how I want you to use the AI and what I think you want the outcome

to be. So I think people are thinking that it's like something that it's not, because when I look at it, I think that in the future, we'll see AI embedded. in all of these digital tools that we use, right? So like when Excel came out, did we all have to become Excel coders? No, it didn't make sense for us to all be Excel coders. There were a few Excel coders. Excel was made very customer-friendly,

and now I just click on and use Excel, right? And now we can embed AI in Excel or in our email. So that's what I think is going to happen, is that all these apps and ways that we work will have their AI interface, and we'll just be clicking a button, and we won't all have to be sitting around figuring out prompts in our jobs to do. So I think we're sort of creating this false narrative that people are going to have to get really skilled up and use AI in their job and show this 20% productivity when probably the average person shouldn't be asked to do that any more than they were asked to use Excel to solve a computational problem. in two years, it's just going to be embedded in the way that we work, and you'll still use it to plan your trip to Bali or to ask it to be your thought partner on higher order thinking, but you won't necessarily have to come in and now spend most of your job time figuring out how to ask AI the right kinds of questions. I think it'll be interesting to see how it all involves. So for those people that are worried, I would just put a pin in your worry. You know, they say that innovation,

is adapted, adopted much slower in the short term, and it moves faster in the long term. For all these changes, I think companies are starting to see a little bit of a backlash. You saw companies that were laying people off and now they're hiring them back again. You know, IBM has made efforts to hire younger people because they want to have the AI human combination. I wouldn't overindex on the worry if you're a young person. develop those durable skills, make sure you're in a field that needs your expertise, and let's wait and see how all of this turns out because there could be a little bit more hype than we need right now.

So you wouldn't overindex on worry if you're a young person. What if you're in the opposite situation? So let's say you're 50, or we'll say 55, you still have 10 more years to go in your career. You're not in a position to early retire, so you need to work until you're 65. at least, maybe 67, 68 minimum before you'll be ready to retire. You're worried that you might endure a job loss at the age of 55, but because you might be seen by employers as less adaptive, less tech savvy, less ready to embrace an AI future, that kind of age discrimination, which can affect people in their 50s or 60s might impede your chances of getting a job,

which you need. What do you do? That's a real issue. And I have seen people that were at that age, didn't want to learn, were honest about it, had that conversation with their manager, and they were let go in the next wave of reductions. You have to be true to yourself in terms of answering that question. But if you answer that question and you say that you're willing to embrace the future and you are eager to learn and figure out how to use the tool, then I think. you have to make good on that and you do have to get the training, the exposure, try to use it. In a way, it's feeding into this frenzy that I described before where corporations are kind of forcing you to try it and they don't have a plan. And so maybe you're kind of rolling your eyes going, okay, I'm using the AI to do this workflow. The workflow is really simple. I don't actually need AI to do the workflow, but they've told me to use it and show my productivity improvement. I think you have to do a little bit of that, unfortunately, because that's just the wave that we're in right now as we're trying to figure things out.

I think that you can show how to be a leader. Being a leader is showing how you use AI intelligently. So maybe you're the person that comes up with the prompt fact sheet for your department. Hey, you know what? I know we're all being asked to use AI. I've been doing a little studying on it. I've tried Claude, Chat, Gemini. This is how I've been using each of them.

and here's how I think we can use it in our job set effectively. So you can take leadership and help people to use it more intelligently. But yes, unfortunately, I think that you have to show that you're in that wave of embracing innovation and change and that you want to be part of it as opposed to not. Because unfortunately, I think companies are putting people in two camps, the ones that are willing to learn and grow and try it and the ones that aren't. and if you say you're not, that's automatically. I mean, I'm sorry that that's the answer, but it's just the truth.

So you're going to have to play along with it and or figure out how to like it and embrace it and use it. Yeah. Well, it's not even if you say you're not, but like if you show you're not, it's what you do and not what you say. Yes. Yeah. You do have to do it. I personally find it fascinating. I mean, I love to learn.

And I think it's really interesting to have an additional tool. I'm concerned, obviously, about the cognitive decline for me, my family, my students, everybody. I mean, I'm concerned about that. So I'm just making sure that I use it in the right way to help make me smarter, you know, perform better, and that I tell everybody that I can. These are the positive ways that you can use it. And just like you had a great experience with it. If you use it as a thought partner, you can really enjoy having that kind of interaction with it.

Right. How do you know if you are improving at the skill set of using it intelligently, especially given that it is so sycophantic? How do you get accurate feedback as to your improvement in use of AI? Well, your prompting gets a lot more sophisticated and purpose-driven. And again, you can tell by the way that you're prompting it, that you're asking the right kinds of questions, and that the response that you're getting is more useful and helpful to you.

I know this is more qualitative than quantitative, but I think if you start to use it and like the experience that you had, that was kind of an aha moment, oh, you know what, my intuition was telling me something. This person gave me an answer. I needed to use AI to test it. And I found that, yeah, that was kind of a limited view. So I think qualitatively, you can see that you're experiencing getting better feedback from it and getting more efficient. I think another thing that you can do quantitatively, if you have a Claude subscription and you're doing a couple runs at a project and you're running out of tokens, you're probably not using AI very efficiently if you're running out of tokens because that means that you're making, because Claude will show you all of its work.

Right. Right. You're making Cloud do way too much work. It's coding everything that you're asking. You're probably being really inefficient in how you're asking your questions. Maybe you're asking it to do computations that really don't make sense. If you're running out of tokens, I think it's time to stop and recheck your prompting strategies and how you're using AI. I think that's a really simple way you can do it. I've had situations. Let's say I was using it to develop a business plan or something. And I might have been a little bit over. over indexing on it. And I ran out, I'm like, okay, enough. Can't run out of tokens, you know, asking Claude to develop something. So we all have to rein ourselves back in. But I think this is just happening as we're experimenting with it. We're trying to test the boundaries of what it can do and what it can know and whether it's useful or not. And we're figuring it out. So for every person, it's going to be a slightly different experience. Like your acumen with Excel might be different from mine. Right. Some people are going to be more used to it. And not every job set needs AI.

Right. If I'm in certain job sets, I might not be having conversations with AI every day. If I'm in a high knowledge intensive job set, I may need to talk to AI on a daily basis. Right. In building a company and in building out a team, how do you incorporate agentic AI team members into that company culture? Yeah, that's an interesting one too. Well, I've seen them created and then personified and then used and referred to. I guess you do that. I know that can feel a little weird. Oh, no, we straight up have like they have names, they've got bios.

Yeah, I call them imaginary friends. Yes. Yeah, we have fully imaginary friends. Your fake employees, right? Yeah. So the challenge there is while you personify them and give them work to do, remembering that they are artificial. I mean, I've been hearing a lot of crazy stuff about men having AI wives and, you know, all sorts of things, AI friends. So I think we do have to rein ourselves back and think about the limitations of the agent and what it can do as much as we'd like to tell it about our bad day.

and have that conversation with it. Right, right. But I'm thinking in terms of like the, we talked earlier about culture, and especially as a small business owner, as a totally bootstrapped small business owner, many members of my team are going to be agentic AI. And so I'm going to have a team that is comprised of human people and agentic AI, personified, agentic AI. And I think it's important in those situations.

to still have the human oversee the agent. The human with the higher order of thinking, decision-making, intuition, empathy, like making sure that the work that the agent's doing is accurate, high-quality, and it makes sense. So what I'm seeing in the whole hybridization of work and workflows is that the best models are where we pair the agent with the human. Right. And the human is still checking the work, making the final decision, because, you know, the agent might make a good decision 80% of the time.

But what about if the use case has some nuances to it or some empathic elements to it? You still want to make sure that there's a human that's checking in on that. Right. Yeah. It kind of becomes a system where leadership and management is developed in a way where you're developing your human team to take – a management role over an agentic workforce that reports to them? Yes. Yes.

And they have to figure out where they fit in the workflow, what work they're going to do, what questions they're going to ask them and how they bring them into the team and the workflow. Right. And not be overly reliant. Right. So that's an interesting area, too. A lot of interesting unknowns.

We need to meet up in two years and say, okay, now we have. our crystal ball and we can look back and say, what do we get right and what do we get wrong? But I think that's the exciting part of it. It's just this brave new world and we're all figuring it out as we go. Right. Exactly. We're currently in the process of building out a fully agentic AI board of directors. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Which I was like, wait a minute. Can the board fire me? Can I get fired by my own agentic AI? And can they? I don't know. I guess we need to figure I guess you have to figure out. I mean, I guess if it's truly a board, they should have the authority to do so.

But you'll need to write the rules around what will constitute that. Yeah, I guess if they, well, gross negligence, misconduct. Right. Yeah. So you have to give them your charter. Right. You still have to feed the board your charter. Yeah.

Tell them what their role is. Right. Tell them how often they meet and the questions you want them to weigh. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. That's what we're working on right now. Wow. I guess in that case, if they do fire you, you could just say no. They have no power, at least not right now. Yeah. Wow. Well, you see, you know a lot more about that than I have. I have not tried an agenic board of directors. Yeah. Well, we're still developing it, but yeah. That's fascinating. Will you have human advisors as well or just all agenic? No, no. It's just all agentic right now. Yeah.

Very interesting, Polly. You're definitely pushing the envelope. I need to interview you about that for your audience. Yeah. Do you recommend that entrepreneurs do that? I guess you do. Well, ask me in two to three months. Okay.

Yeah. When we see how it's playing out. Exactly. Yeah. Well, as we wrap, do you have any hypotheses around what might be next? As far as entrepreneurship? Yeah. As far as entrepreneurship, innovation.

What hypothesis do you have for what entrepreneurship will look like in a year? One thing, we can't deny the fact that digital AI is making it much easier and faster to be an entrepreneur than ever before. The need to raise capital, have a physical building, hire people with expensive salaries has disappeared. So if you're an entrepreneur and you have a compelling idea and you know how to reach an audience tomorrow, you could be in business, you could have very low operating costs, and you could have massive margins. And I think that we see a lot of early stage businesses that have taken advantage of that. So really low barriers to entry to get into entrepreneurship. On the flip side, that also means that there could possibly be a lot of competitors, a lot of people out there trying entrepreneurship.

We talked about the fact that people are miserable in jobs. as an antidote to that, a lot of Gen Z and other populations have decided that, yeah, I'm going to get my computer, go sit on an island in Bali, and run my business. And yes, you can technically do that. It does mean, though, that you still have to go through all of the same disciplined process of knowing what problem you're solving, knowing who your customer is, knowing how you're going to deliver your – so you still have to go through all of the disciplined process of having. having a business model and a business case and all of that diligence, but you can start up pretty fast and you can have a lot of different competitors, though. And so I think there's a lot of pressure to figure out how you either differentiate or how you move really, really fast.

So I think entrepreneurs need to think about those two things. I think in terms of where innovation is taking us, I hate to say it, but I look at the boring stuff like infrastructure. I heard an interview with Larry Ellison, you know, from Oracle a couple weeks ago, and that was teamed up with one of the very first investors in Google. Both of these guys are, you know, billionaires. And they talk about whenever there's a new wave coming, they look at the back-end infrastructure stuff. You know, like who would have thought that Google and SEO would have exploded in the way that it did. Like a lot of people that are looking for front end go to market sort of opportunities to invest.

Like, oh, no, that will never turn. I mean, those investors are billionaires now. And so this whole idea of how we allow AI to be operationalized and this data center piece is really, really big. Because the hypers, the five hyperscalers, are using most, they're using 80% of the AI and the chips that are coming out of Nvidia and they're the big drain on these data centers. On the flip side, these data centers are very expensive. They require a lot of electricity.

They require fresh water, a lot of space. And a lot of communities are saying not in my backyard. And so they don't want these data centers erected in their homes. So that whole space of what we do around data centers is a really interesting area to watch for growth, innovation, and investment, not that it's going to be sexy and interesting, like going to space or, you know, Elon Musk having a new lifestyle on Mars. I've seen discussions about could we put the data centers and cylinders in space? I don't know. That's kind of crazy. But I have heard visions of the planet Earth is just for the people and green grass and everything that's

sustainable and we put everything that's related to infrastructure in space. And I think those are interesting things to think about. It's interesting to think about how we expand transportation underground. There's been those trolleys, you know, going from the boring company. Yeah. Yeah. So those are going to be the interesting things to think about as everybody embraces AI and we use it and it helps us solve all our day-to-day problems. What is the back office? part of that look like. How do we deal with all of the infrastructure and the data centers and chip making and everything else that we need to sustain it? That's where I'm now turning my attention in terms of where there might be innovation. You've got a financially astute audience that they

want to know where to invest. When it comes to AI, that's probably what I would think about. Wow. Well, thank you. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Lorraine Marshon, LinkedIn, and I have a website. That is also WWW Lorraine Marchand. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Yes. Thank you, Paul.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Lorraine. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, stop firing resumes into the void because your next paycheck is going to come from the people you know, not the portals that you use. So if you are just grinding out job applications and you're not hearing anything back, it's not you. It's the filter because the overwhelming majority of hiring still runs through human relationships. And that style of just shooting out mass applications online, that, according to Lorraine, is the fastest way to get auto-rejected by a machine.

So if you are thinking about increasing your income, if you're thinking about your earning power, some of the highest return activity is not polishing up application number 572. It's building the network and building the relationships that help you get through the front door. We still know that 90% of jobs come through personal connections. I know somebody, and I bring them in for the interview, it's not because you sent 500 resumes out. Stop doing that. You're wasting your time and don't get down when you don't get any responses because the AI tool is designed to screen you out because nobody can possibly evaluate 500 resumes. That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. Use AI as your sparring partner,

not as a crutch because that's what's going to protect your career. Lorraine is worried about what she calls digital dementia, which is the slow cognitive slide. that comes from letting tools do your thinking for you. And her fix isn't to avoid AI. It's to bring your own thinking first and then hand it over to the AI and demand a fight from the AI. So do your own reasoning, form a hypothesis, and then ask the AI to tear apart your hypothesis. That is the difference between getting sharper versus just quietly, slowly, outsourcing your brain. And it's a skill that keeps you valuable as an employee or as an employer

as the tools get better. If you have a question, something that you're working on, you take a first stab at a hypothesis. You do your own independent thinking about it. Maybe you even write something down. And then you say to AI, this is my thought process. This is my objective. This is my hypothesis. This is what I want to do. Poke holes in it. Tell me everything that's wrong with the way I'm thinking about this. Show me where I'm too limited and how I'm thinking about it. Give me a good counter argument. Like push back on me.

Finally, key takeaway number three, if you want to know where the money goes next, watch the boring stuff. For anyone who wants to know where to invest, Lorraine recommends avoiding the flashy front end kind of stuff and looking instead at the unglamorous plumbing that's underneath, both literally and metaphorically, the plumbing. She talks about the pattern that made the early Google backers into billionaires when a new wave hits.

What great investors do is they look at the back-end infrastructure that everybody else is ignoring. And so right now, that means data centers, chips, power, and water. The physical guts that make AI actually run. I hate to say it, but I look at the board. boring stuff like infrastructure. I heard an interview with Larry Ellison from Oracle, and that was teamed up with one of the very first investors in Google. Both of these guys are billionaires.

And they talk about whenever there's a new wave coming, they look at the back-end infrastructure stuff. You know, like who would have thought that Google and SEO would have exploded in the way that it did? Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Lorraine Marchand. Thank you so much for being part of the Afforder community. If you enjoyed this episode, please do three things. First, share this with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues.

Share this with the people in your life, people who are looking for jobs, people who are starting a side hustle or a small business, people who are trying to figure out where to invest as we enter an AI present. people who are trying to figure out how to not let their brain rot in this AI present. Share this with all of those people and more, because that is how you spread the message of F F-I-R-E. And I know I started this episode by saying that this episode was really going to be about that letter E entrepreneurship, but as you've heard, we also talked about the letter I increasing your

income as it applies to a lot of people. And we talked a bit about the other letter I for investing. So if you want to spread the message of F-E, this hits three out of the five. Thank you for sharing it with the people in your life. Number two, please open up your favorite podcast playing app. Make sure you are following us. And while you're there, please leave a comment and leave up to a five-star review. That's incredibly important in helping us book amazing guests.

We started this episode by talking about the culture. inside of a company and how that affects you, your mindset. We talked about what AI does to your brain and how to keep your brain strong, how to not let yourself outsource your thinking. So if you want to deeply interrogate your thinking, to exercise your brain, to become a better thinker, we have a free exercise that you can follow along with. You can download it for free at afford anything.com slash turn to be. It Around. That's afford anything.com slash turn it around. This is a thought exercise in which you

interrogate the ideas that form inside your own mind. It's available to you for free and it's an incredible tool that you can use so that you don't outsource your thinking, so that you challenge your thinking, and so that you walk away with a new set of ideas that can help you as you build a business, as you manage your family finances, as you move through a rapidly changing, I want to say future, but we all know it's the present. As you move through a rapidly changing present. Again, afford anything.com slash turn it around. Downloading that. It's the number three thing that you can do to spread the message of FWIRE. It's also the number one thing that you can do to take this information and apply it to your life, make it useful.

Turn it into action. Again, that's affordanithing.com slash turn it around. Thank you again for being an afforder. My name is Paula Kant. This is the Afford Anything podcast. And I'll meet you in the next episode.