How AI Could Change Your Health, Money, and Time with Woody Taylor (Ep. 12)

AI is becoming more personal, but if you’re thinking about using it to make sense of your health, finances, or everyday decisions, how much should you actually trust it? Understanding what these tools can and can’t do may help you decide where AI belongs in your life.

In this episode, Jon Meyer speaks with Woody Taylor, Owner of Paramis.ai, about practical ways individuals can use AI. They explore how better prompts, voice interaction, citations, and personal context can improve results. Woody also considers how AI may monitor health information, influence financial choices, change how people spend their time, and eventually run locally on personal devices. The discussion also addresses privacy and the importance of deciding how much information you’re comfortable sharing.

Woody discusses:

• How conversational AI can become more useful when you provide richer personal context and ask better questions
• Why voice interaction and neutral prompts can produce more useful responses than short typed instructions
• How health monitoring may become more proactive as AI gains access to personal information and device data
• Why privacy and convenience will become closely connected as AI becomes more involved in everyday decisions
• How personal AI could influence spending, debt, investing, leisure time, and other financial choices
• And more!

 

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Watch us on YouTube at https://youtu.be/h2SPZAM_dpY.

Connect with Jon Meyer:

• BGM
• LinkedIn: Jon Meyer
• Email: jmeyer@BGM360.com
• Schedule a Call

Connect with Woody Taylor:

• Paramis AI
• LinkedIn: Woody Taylor
• Email: woody@paramis.ai

 

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Transcript

Woody Taylor: Every single person on Earth with a mobile phone has the ability to speak with something that has a tested-out IQ of around 130 to 145. Why wouldn’t we wanna jump in and explore that?

Jon Meyer: Teaching someone to use their voice instead of typing, and they get such a richer answer, and it blows their mind. And then they keep trying it in different ways, and then they come back and they’re like, “I never knew it could do that.” It could always do it.

Welcome to Mastering the 360 Mindset with Jon Meyer from BGM. Join us as we explore ways to make the most out of your wealth, health, and time, unlocking opportunities for balance and lasting success. With insights from Jon’s years of experience and guest experts, you’ll gain the tools to design a life that works on your terms.

Now, onto the show.

Jon Meyer: Well, good day, everyone. My name is Jon Meyer, and welcome to another podcast of Mastering the 360 Mindset. Today I have an extra special guest, Woody Taylor. Woody is an AI guy, specialist, consultant, however you wanna call him. I’ll let Woody tell us what he is. I’ve spent a lot of time with Woody over the years, and I thought it would be fun to have him on to talk about where the intersection of health, wealth, and time meet AI because everyone’s talking about AI.

Jon Meyer: So Woody, if you could take just a minute and introduce yourself and where your road has led you to today.

Woody Taylor: Yeah. Thanks, Jon, and hello, everybody. Like Jon said, my name is Woody Taylor. I’ve been in the AI space for about 10 years now, and really that was a continuation of a career that I had in operations and technology where I was focused a lot on workforce productivity, automation across a lot of different industries.

Woody Taylor: So in the late 2000 or late 2010s when GPT-2 and some of the earlier LLM models came out, they were a natural extension of my work, and I just dived in deep. And a couple years ago, I just completely w- just went out on my own just as a, as a sole owner of Paramis.ai, my firm, and in that capacity I work with lots of different companies, usually in regulated environments, finance, medical technology, but also in spaces like mechanical engineering and just really try to be a place here in the Twin Cities where business owners can reach out and just get some assistance for a pretty rocky journey that it’s been for everybody.

Woody Taylor: We’re all kind of figuring this out, and I’m kind of along to help people with that journey.

Jon Meyer: Yeah. So let’s actually start there because the journey for some people started, what, you think two, two and a half years ago when ChatGPT-

Woody Taylor: November 30th, 20… Yeah, probably around 2023. Mid-2023 I think is when people started wondering about the usefulness of this stuff.

Woody Taylor: But yeah, go ahead.

Jon Meyer: Yeah. Yeah, so to that point, where are we in this revolution of AI?

Woody Taylor: Yeah, it’s– I think it’s a… I can’t remember, Jon, who wrote it. William Gibson. What was it? The– There’s a quote, a famous quote out there, “Where the future is here, it’s just not equally distributed.”

Jon Meyer: Mm-hmm.

Woody Taylor: And what, in general, that I see, you know, there certainly are going to be firms like software engineering predominantly, fintech and things like that, which have really adopted some of the deeper technical capabilities that are available out there.

Woody Taylor: There’s actually a pretty considerable gap between what is technically available and what a lot of businesses and a lot of people are willing to turn on. So I would argue that, you know, generally I talk to people about this AI journey being three phases. The first is what I call this assistant phase, where we’re working with tools like ChatGPT and Claude and Copilot.

Woody Taylor: It’s kind of an interactive assistant that we’re using at our desktops. The second phase of that is what I call the agentic phase, and this is something that’s really come into play this year, where these tools are able to act on their own. Given objectives, they can work without necessarily direct work or oversight.

Woody Taylor: And some companies are starting to turn on a lot of those kind of technologies as well. That third phase, nobody’s at yet. That really is a third phase where I would just characterize that as kind of a post-AGI phase, where we don’t really understand what kind of capabilities these tools will have, how they’ll show up in our worlds.

Woody Taylor: Nobody’s really in that space just yet, although there certainly are a lot of people that are trying to plan for it. The majority of us are in this assistant phase still. We are still getting comfortable with the notion of talking to these machine intelligences, seeing what they can do to augment, delegate or augment work in our lives or work that we can delegate to them.

Woody Taylor: So we’re all kind of still figuring this out, and nobody should necessarily feel bad about where they’re at unless they haven’t started, and in which case I definitely would encourage people to start to play around with these tools and think about how they show up in their business and their personal lives.

Jon Meyer: That’s kind of what I wanted to touch upon here a little bit. When people hear AI, I think the natural instinct is to say, “Well, this is just a business tool.”

Woody Taylor: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: But it’s actually an extreme individual tool.

Woody Taylor: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: And I know you’ve done some classes to individuals.

Woody Taylor: Mm-hmm.

Jon Meyer: And I think you’ve learned a few things about what individuals should and shouldn’t be thinking.

Jon Meyer: So why don’t you give us a little bit of insight into how individuals are using it and, and what you’re seeing?

Woody Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s a space that we haven’t taken advantage of enough. You know, we literally have, until fairly recently, you know, this is the one time in human history where citizens arguably had as much power as governments in terms of the ability to build their own knowledge, customize their own knowledge to their own ends, using the same sort of powerful technologies that, that the wealthier classes and governments historically have kind of had, had a toehold on.

Woody Taylor: Everybody has access to this stuff, and nobody’s necessarily using it enough. So, you know, part of my business, I certainly am full-time enterprise during the day, but sometimes at evenings, I will teach evening courses to either senior groups or other interested groups just to kind of– Honestly, it’s interactive.

Woody Taylor: It gets me out of the house a little bit, and it’s fun to introduce these technologies in. But I also like to get people activated in terms of how they’re using these tools, and I really can’t underestimate enough the ability for these tools to affect your own personal life, whether it’s evaluating your financial situation or evaluating your health situation.

Woody Taylor: Not recommending that anybody treat these tools as experts within those domains. That said, they’re a hell of a good second opinion. So– And I see that repeatably in students’ courses where people start to realize they can use this to understand a hospital bill. They can use this to understand a new company that they’re interested in even acquiring, that kind of thing, with the kind of research that they can do within that.

Woody Taylor: And then on a personal level, again, whether it’s exercise plans or anything else, it really is how much somebody is going to trust the responses from these tools and the environment that they’re in as to what they can extrapolate out of them. Only caution I would give to personal users that are using these tools is to make sure you are using a paid subscription.

Woody Taylor: You know, free AI is not particularly good. Folks that do use this within their personal lives, that twenty dollars a month to ChatGPT or to Claude or to Copilot, which are really the three platforms that I recommend right now to most people and, and most businesses, that’s money well spent because you get access to greater intelligences.

Woody Taylor: And at that point, you start to have a personal assistant in your life, and then you have to figure out on your own what you are and are not comfortable shaping with that personal assistant. So in my own case, I will tell you as a, you know, single employee firm I have literally separate agent personas that are on a continual basis building memories about my day, memories about my interactions.

Woody Taylor: They are a linchpin for me to actually get work done. And I’m not necessarily suggesting anybody go down that path so hard where they literally just become as reliant on these things as I, as I have, but they’re wonderful for interrogating the stuff that’s frustrating in life. If your sprinkler system breaks, which is an actual use case that a lot of these seniors come up with in class, I guess lots of deficient sprinklers in those groups that I’ve talked about.

Woody Taylor: If your sprinkler is breaking, if your refrigerator’s on the fritz, in my particular case, if you’re getting high-balled on bids for boiler replacements in your basement and stuff like that, these tools become wonderful third parties that are entirely there to be focused on your own needs and help you cultivate different decisions.

Woody Taylor: So kind of a long-winded response, but, you know, people can craft in this level of intelligence into their lives about any way they’d like to. It really is just a matter of their comfort level and the security settings on the AI tool that they’re using.

Jon Meyer: So you, you touch upon something that I find interesting, though. If I extrapolate from that, I would say I still hear individuals say that AI’s just gonna hallucinate and give me a bad answer. Yeah. I think you and I would agree that that day is mostly gone, but maybe, maybe not completely gone.

Woody Taylor: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: Talk about that, but also talk about what are the opportunities people are overlooking?

Woody Taylor: Yeah. So let me try to hit the first thing first and, uh, come back to opportunities that folks are overlooking. You know, when these tools came out, they had a couple knocks against them. They hallucinated a lot, meaning they would make stuff up out of whole cloth, as well as the fact they couldn’t do things like math very well.

Woody Taylor: You know, and hallucinations are literally how these tools work. They are trying to predict and anticipate what the user has asked them. Classic example I always give people is that if I said, “Knock, knock,” to you, Jon, what would you say back?

Jon Meyer: Who’s there?

Woody Taylor: Who’s there? And that’s not because you reached for a specific joke that you heard last week or the first knock-knock joke you’ve heard all your life.

Woody Taylor: You have just been exposed to so many of these knock-knock jokes that you anticipate that the natural response to me asking you that is, “Who’s there?” Now, it’s not always who’s there. There are different responses to that question about knock-knock. And what these AI tools are doing is when you interact with them, it really is a continual pattern of asking them knock-knock jokes, and they might not always give you the correct response.

Woody Taylor: And because of that, sometimes you used to get hallucinations. They would literally get– predict the wrong words, go down the wrong paths. Now, I won’t say hallucinations have completely resolved. Sometimes these models will get upside down, but it’s drastically different than it used to be. And I think overall, it’s important for people to understand, even though it’s kind of abstract, is that these tools are not necessarily conditioned to give us the right or wrong answers.

Woody Taylor: They give us the answers that best match the question that was asked, and they are getting much better at that. I would always encourage people to use paid AI tools and make sure that answers that AI tools are giving them are actually grounded in citations, which they’re actually very good about doing.

Woody Taylor: If you’re ever in doubt about the output of one of these tools, ask it to audit itself, audit its last response, or provide citations to back up claims. So there are ways to navigate out of that hallucinations thing. And beyond that, in terms of what opportunities are missing are, are people overlooking, I mean, I think it’s the whole function of being educated about what’s out there.

Woody Taylor: There certainly is a lot that you can turn on with these tools. In my own case, my own system, it controls everything. Every single file on my computer. It has access to a lot of information that people are not necessarily comfortable giving to these tools. That’s a decision that I’ve made myself and I felt very comfortable with.

Woody Taylor: But I’m also, you know, relatively cognizant of what I’m doing and what permissions I’m giving these tools. At the end of the day, I think the biggest things that people are missing out on with these tools is the ability to use them as collaborators. Usually, people are using these for task delegation. Go do this, go do this.

Woody Taylor: It is an entirely different world when you sit in front of some of these more powerful models and simply ask them to collaborate with you. I’ve got this situation, give me four or five different ideas for how we might approach it, where they really get into a conversational back and forth with these tools, where they are ideating and creating, not just trying to solve some mundane, non-value-added activity.

Jon Meyer: When you say it that way, what comes to mind right away is, and how do you do that? Because I’ll point out two things, and I’ll let you run with this, but two things that you taught me two years ago that changed my life. You’ve taught me a lot of things that changed my life, but-

Woody Taylor: That’s it. Always don’t lose your passport.

Woody Taylor: Yep. Go ahead.

Jon Meyer: yeah. Yeah, these, these two things really did. One was don’t ask it directly for anything. Ask it- Mm-hmm … to create a prompt to find those things. So you, you have it create a something, a prompt that it knows will be better. And then the second thing you taught me was use your voice, never use your keyboard.

Jon Meyer: Yeah. So why don’t you sp- speak to those two things, but also, you know, is there other ways we should be interacting with these things?

Woody Taylor: Yeah. I’ll, I’ll address the first two, and I’ll tackle on the third one. A lot of times people will sit down in front of these tools and not necessarily know how to ask for things.

Woody Taylor: I know I have this task. I know I have this concept or problem. How do I even relate that to this computer screen, okay? And the easiest way to address something like that is literally to tell that AI model just that. Log into ChatGPT, grab one of those thinking or reasoning models that are there that are just light years different from the experience most people have had with AI, and simply tell the computer, “Hey, I am trying to work through this kind of thing.

Woody Taylor: I have no idea how to phrase this to you. Ask me questions so you can better understand and get aligned with where I’m at here.” And the AI tool will do just that. It will start to ask questions, and what starts to happen is that a very rich context or conversational thread starts to get created, where the AI is, basically will assist the user and walk them through how to interact with it.

Woody Taylor: These machines know how to talk to themselves at this point very well, so the goal is just to engage that. If you never are sure how to ask something of these tools or why to ask them something, tell them that. Just go ahead and voice out, “I’m uncertain about where things are heading.” Now, the second thing, what was the other thing I taught you?

Woody Taylor: I taught you so many things. What was the second thing?

Jon Meyer: Well, to, uh, use my voice, not my keyboard.

Woody Taylor: Use your voice. Yeah, and on that end, these tools have largely been trained on conversations. They thrive on conversational context, and that’s a big sea change for those of us that have been using this tool, using computers for, in my case, three decades.

Woody Taylor: You know, we’re used to typing commands, whether it’s the C prompt or whether we’re in Excel or PowerPoint. We’ve always understood that there are certain deterministic things that you click or do or say that generally are just kind of fragments of how we actually speak. When we think about things and when we talk about them, that is very different from thinking about things and trying to type them into words to a computer.

Woody Taylor: We filter down, which is natural, unless you’re just a ridiculously capable typist. So what I generally encourage all users to do, corporate and professional, is to start to talk to these tools. ChatGPT in particular has a very good dictation key. Most of the models have dictation capabilities now, but these machines thrive off of that conversational context, the adjectives you use, the adverbs you use.

Woody Taylor: My boss is so pissed off at me today. I think my spouse is going to leave me kind of stuff, you know, those kinds of things. Mm-hmm. If you, if you are using conversational interactions with these tools, you simply give them more rich context as to what’s going on, and they’re that much more capable of helping you.

Woody Taylor: Plus, it’s a lot faster interaction. And the third thing that I would suggest that people do, just to tack onto that, those two things, those two life lessons, is to also speak to these tools as neutrally and objectively as possible. They are very biased towards you. If you give ChatGPT an email and say, “Hey, I’ve written it– I’ve written this.

Woody Taylor: Does this look good?” It’s almost always gonna start off with how good that thing looks. They’re assistants. That’s their job, okay? And really, they don’t act any different than any employee in most organizations where a manager might come up and ask for input. It’s entirely, it’s always gonna have some sort of bias.

Woody Taylor: So instead, what I try to train people to do is to interact with these tools using objective and neutral language. Instead of saying, “This is my email,” give it an email and say, “I just got this from somebody. Evaluate it for pros and cons.” That kind of neutral phrasing and like the audit your response that I talked about earlier, this really will give you a much more objective and analytically based interaction with these tools, and you generally get much better answers that you can trust much more.

Jon Meyer: To add just to what you just said, one thing you also then taught me was just ask it what you’re missing, and I’ve done that now almost every time. Yeah. It’s a very neutral question, but it always comes up with something better.

Woody Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. It’ll always find stuff and, you know, particularly for professionals of, of certain age, like myself and other folks around my age and that kind of thing, lots of people feel like they have life figured out.

Woody Taylor: They might encounter a task that they’ve done before and say, “I already know what I’m gonna do here.” Maybe it’s expressing out some sort of new project to coworkers. Maybe on a personal level, it’s spring cleanup activities around the house. In general, what my experience has been, if you talk to these models about tasks, work that are in front of you, they are very good at regurgitating stuff that, yeah, you already knew how to do that.

Woody Taylor: But oftentimes they’ll call out a couple of things where it’s like, “Right, that was an oversight. I should probably think about things like that.” And that’s really that kind of augmentative collaborative relationship that I think is the biggest bonus of using these tools right now, Jon, that you’re experiencing and that you’re describing, is working with them as colleagues, collaborators to flesh out ideas.

Woody Taylor: They’re enormously smart if they understand where you’re coming from. So getting good at expressing your own personal context to these tools really does yield quite a bit of results.

Jon Meyer: So I wanna pivot a little bit towards health and wealth- Mm-hmm … and some of the personal stuff. One of the things that I’ve noticed, for example, my wife and I are, are taking the kids on a trip in this winter, and if you do a certain way of looking at the, at a prompt- I think what I’d like you to speak to is the fact that these models are trained up to a certain date.

Woody Taylor: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: And therefore, they don’t always have the most current information. Mm-hmm. They could– You can get them to get the most current information. That’s a different way, thing. But when you look at it from that angle, how do people start to use these things for things like their health or their wealth if they can’t get the most current information?

Jon Meyer: Like where sh- where should we stop right now? And maybe if you look at the future, where is AI going where we can feel comfortable looking at that?

Woody Taylor: Yeah. Let me just talk a little bit about that training cutoffs, that concept that you kinda started off with here, and then just to provide some context for the res- my response.

Woody Taylor: You know, these models, and this really is the most expensive part of AI, these models are all trained. And what I mean by that is they are put in multi-month events where they are exposed to trillions of different kinds of pieces of data over and over and over until they start to basically extract out patterns that become literal memories for them.

Woody Taylor: They learn how to tell knock-knock jokes, okay? But that training event, in addition to being very expensive and very complex, can only be done up to a certain point in time. And I would always encourage people, first time you log into an AI model, ask it what its training cutoff date is. They’re pretty good about telling you that, even though sometimes you gotta confirm the answer.

Woody Taylor: Like in the case of the models that are in ChatGPT right now, they are trained through February 2026. Now what that means is, if you were to meet one of these models out in the wild, they would not necessarily know anything about human events past February. So the most important thing that you can do if you are asking a model about things that are dynamic, things that are changing with time, maybe it’s research into a particular health condition or who won the World Cup, you wanna make sure that these models can use the web to go out and find and provide citations for you.

Woody Taylor: The end of the day, I actually don’t u… Well, I do use these tools quite a bit for knowledge search, but if you are using these tools for knowledge search, the easiest thing to do is to always make sure that the model provides citations in its response. That’s pretty ironclad, and it is on you to make sure it’s citing the right sources and stuff.

Woody Taylor: But these models have a wonderful behavior that nobody anticipated. They’re very good at finding high-quality citations for the claims that they make. So that’s discipline that’s on the user. You’re responsible for the outputs of these tools and what they do with it. Make sure they’re providing citations to back up claims.

Jon Meyer: Well, I think part of what I’m asking too is knowing that how are these tools to be used, and maybe how will they change in monitoring our health, monitoring our bodies?

Jon Meyer: The idea that there are gonna be new studies that come on board and get dropped on the internet, if a model doesn’t include that, how will we know that we have the most up-to-date information?

Woody Taylor: Yeah. I probably don’t have a blanket answer for that. I think it’ll be very situationally dependent. Again, if somebody is trying to track the latest in pancreatic cancer research, that is something that you’re making very intentional with these models that stating that you want to understand the very latest and greatest.

Woody Taylor: For stuff like how does a fifty-three-year-old man start a good exercise program, the model already kinda knows that stuff. So you know, need to think about the relevancy and how dynamic those questions are over time. Ultimately, I think that, you know, where all this goes, first off, ChatGPT and Claude and tools right now have the ability to connect to your health documentation, if that’s something you wanna do, even your financial information, if that’s something that you wanna do.

Woody Taylor: And everybody needs to make their own decisions there. I’m pretty open-ended with, uh, these tools, and they talk to my Apple Watch, and they can take in all kinds of sensory inputs here. I think the big change that’s gonna come for people in future years, Jon, is that right now you could have an AI tool recording about every sort of health information about you that you want.

Woody Taylor: You still gotta go out there and retrieve that information, talk to it about that information. I think the way of the future is that these things are gonna become much more ambient in nature in both corporate environments as well as profession- or personal lives, where they simply will start to interject, and that’ll be interesting.

Woody Taylor: But I do think there is a world where you could log on or you could get a message on your watch or your phone, that said, from your AI tool that says, “Hey, over the last 30 days, your heart rate has been behaving this way,” that kind of thing, where they get much more proactive about stepping in when they see things are out of line.

Woody Taylor: And I think that’s gonna be a pretty interesting change for a lot of people, and I think there’s gonna be good parts of that, and there’s gonna be downsides for that, too.

Jon Meyer: So when you say that, the first downside I think of immediately is that plenty of people are gonna feel like that is an intrusion.

Woody Taylor: Yep.

Jon Meyer: But to, to the point, AI works best when it can basically continually aggregate more and more data about you.

Woody Taylor: Yep. Absolutely.

Jon Meyer: So as we move forward, where is that intersection gonna occur where people start to feel confident of letting it off? Is, is it right now that we just don’t trust it? Is it that- And when I think about some of the actors, they’re constantly trying to scare us with.

Jon Meyer: this could be bad. When does this kinda stop and we start to lean into this as, wow, this is really helpful and I gotta let it collect the data?

Woody Taylor: You know, it’s pretty interesting because right now we give a lot of data away for free to things that aren’t that life-affirming. You know, if you think about some of the apps and the intrusions that you have on your phone and stuff like that, history’s kinda shown us unfortunately, Jon, for what it’s worth, that people will give up privacy in return for convenience, you know?

Woody Taylor: So, I think that is really gonna be a function of how convenient these tools become. But I should probably say, and probably should’ve said from the outset, is that I’m not necessarily pushing these tools down anybody’s throats. This is a path that somebody can go down if they want. There are some weeks when I’m very pro-AI.

Woody Taylor: There are some weeks when I absolutely hate this stuff, and I certainly respect anybody’s decision not to open up their lives to these tools. In my particular case, it worked out pretty well in terms of how I use them, but I don’t have that expectation of everybody else. I’ll give you a, an actual s- event to point towards.

Woody Taylor: This fall, when Siri’s upgrade comes through on Apple phones, I think will be a very interesting transitional moment, Jon, ’cause it’ll be the first time that, if it works, Siri is actually using reasoning AI onboard a device to do a lot more than it ever could before. It’s gonna move beyond timers and alarms, in theory.

Woody Taylor: If it works half as good as how they are saying it’s gonna work, you’re gonna see tens of millions of people all exposed to more powerful AI for the first time right there on their device, and I think it’ll be pretty interesting to see what kind of traction and pickup we get from that. Because that Siri that’s gonna be on that phone is gonna know an awful lot about you.

Woody Taylor: It’ll be interesting to see what people are willing to give up to get more out of that.

Jon Meyer: Yep, I’ve, I’ve heard a lot about that event as the event when the individuals notices that AI’s helpful.

Woody Taylor: Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Meyer: Apple’s promise to all of us, I think, is that it’s gonna be secure. That’s kind of their entire business model, right?

Woody Taylor: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Jon Meyer: We’ll see.

Woody Taylor: We’ll see.

Jon Meyer: So turning to, I, I’m not asking you to make stock market prognostications here.

Woody Taylor: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: But how do you think AI, especially for the individual, I’m not talking just about the corporation here, the individual’s gonna change- I like to think of it as our personal economy. How do you think this impacts us individually on the economic level?

Jon Meyer: ‘Cause we can all argue that investing in it might make you some money, you know, yep, but how does it change the economy?

Woody Taylor: Oh, way to change the economy in so many different ways. And just to kinda dial it in a little bit, let’s just, you know, you and I have been talking about prediction markets and forecasting and stuff like that.

Woody Taylor: I think these AI tools, I think everybody is gonna have AI tools in, in the future that are gonna allow them to make very informed decisions about where they could be making investments, very informed decisions as to what companies might be good opportunities to invest in or not. It’s gonna be very interesting when everybody is working off of that same kinda superpower.

Woody Taylor: And yes, there will always be these trading firms that have their own inherent capacities that your average Joe is not gonna be able to match. But I think it’s gonna be pretty interesting when every day trader in the future and everything else is largely getting the same information, unless they’ve figured out a different way to read it.

Woody Taylor: I feel like the stock market’s gonna get more and more normalized. I just think AI is gonna be making the majority of the decisions in investments, and I could be horribly wrong in that. But ultimately, it’s gonna open up a lot more awareness of the best ways to use money for people, whether that’s investments or whether that’s anywhere else in their life.

Woody Taylor: I just think it’s going to be everybody’s gonna have an internal CFO, and hopefully folks that are using these tools are making better financial decisions as a result of it. I think you could go into, I mean, overall, just a more conservative environment in terms of how people manage their finances, because I think people will be less likely to, you know, spend $100,000 on a car or take a eight-week vacation to Europe if there’s an AI tool that they have in their lives that is really talking to them about some of the downstream consequences of that kind of action and accruing debt and that kind of thing.

Woody Taylor: These tools will get far more personable than they are today in terms of you’re gonna be talking to these things real time back and forth. They’re gonna be listening to you throughout the day. If you choose to let them do that kind of thing, you really are gonna have an advocate, and I think that will ultimately, I think hopefully people will make much more prudent financial decisions than they used to.

Woody Taylor: I don’t know. Is that a fair response to your question? It’s a, it’s a broad question, so I wanna make sure I at least grab part of it.

Jon Meyer: Yeah, it’s a broad question, but part of me is gonna ask a follow-up, and the follow-up is does AI, whether it’s talking about our use with our healthcare, our wealth, our whatever it is, does it basically…

Jon Meyer: Everyone’s worried that it’s gonna lead to the machines are gonna do everything.

Woody Taylor: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: But I approach it from a different premise. I actually think it opens up the world to people wanting more personal relationships.

Woody Taylor: Yeah. And that’s even just talking to a, another accounting group yesterday, you know, about what are, what’s gonna become prize commodities here in the future for your customers, and I think this is just gonna be a societal thing in general.

Woody Taylor: I genuinely think there is gonna be an entire renaissance just around the whole notion of authenticity. People are gonna get so tired about worrying about whether or not this voice on the phone is real, or whether this video call is being fully staffed with actual humans. I think customers, and most of us, are just gonna really start to value more authentic interactions with each other, more FaceTime, having more coffee.

Woody Taylor: I hope this happens, for sure, in general. But I think that it is gonna be so pervasive and easy to emulate and simulate different realities, that this authenticity piece, how it shows up in people’s lives with their neighbors, how it shows up in businesses with their customers, we are just gonna by necessity be more interested in authentic things.

Woody Taylor: And that’s why I don’t worry about entire genres of art dying out and all this stuff. I think there’s gonna be a place for AI, a, an AI-centric world or an AI hybrid world, as well as just this kind of personal human world that we’re used to. I think, yeah, authenticity in particular is gonna become more and more important to everybody over the coming years.

Jon Meyer: Have you ever given thought to the idea that if AI is as efficient as they say it’s gonna be- Hmm … and I say that the way I said it because wasn’t it Bill Gates that said technology innovates much slower than we think in the short term, but much faster than we think in the long term?

Woody Taylor: Underestimated over the long term.

Jon Meyer: yeah.

Jon Meyer: Yeah. But have you ever thought about this from that perspective? It’s, and if it innovates as much as we think it is, will it give us much, so much leisure time as human beings that we actually have to rethink how we are spending our day?

Woody Taylor: Well we have been very bad at the notion of leisure time. If you look at the last fifteen or twenty years, you know, where do people spend productivity that’s be- We’ve already, we’ve already had productivity gains because of technology over the last twenty or thirty years.

Woody Taylor: We’ve gotten more time. You know, check the screen time on your iPhone. That generally is not necessarily work time. We spend a lot of time looking at our phones. We kinda find a lot of different reasons to get angry at each other on social media. That’s how we’re using a lot of our leisure time now. So wherever we go, I hope if we open up more leisure time in the future, that we are better at using that leisure time, and I don’t have a great answer for you there.

Woody Taylor: You know, I don’t necessarily buy into any one projection on what the future would look like. I do not think there’s gonna be a world eight years from now where every United States citizen doesn’t have to go to work and can just go frolic in the park and ride their bikes all day. I don’t think we’re going into that kind of place.

Woody Taylor: I think work is such a central notion to how we define ourselves that we’re gonna create work even if work goes away. We simply need that kind of, that is simply just part of our entire evolutionary story, is the notion of doing something, you know. And I don’t think we can necessarily do something if it’s all ki- kind of boxed in this notion of leisure.

Woody Taylor: So ultimately, I don’t know where these things go. I think ultimately we need to be very cognizant of the notion of increased leisure time, Jon, because we don’t necessarily use it very well now, and that’s only gonna get worse with some of the technologies that are gonna come in the future.

Jon Meyer: I agree with you, Woody.

Jon Meyer: I don’t think we use it well. I mean, I… One of the premises I’ve had for a long time is that people never really enjoy their money, and they, they end up with- Yeah … they end up dying with more money than they ever needed because they don’t know how to use it and, and enjoy that leisure time that they have now, much less if they had more.

Woody Taylor: Right. What’s that Gal… What’s that Galloway statistic where Scott Galloway, that influencer guy or whatever. But he’s got that great number that he quotes quite a bit that apparently happiness doesn’t increase past ten million dollars or whatever if you poll all these people. You know, there is this drive that we have to continually try to do stuff, and it’ll be interesting to see where it plays out.

Woody Taylor: Go ahead, sorry.

Jon Meyer: No, that’s okay. So f- from the standpoint, I don’t, I’m not gonna ask you to prognosticate f- what ten years looks like. Who the heck knows? But give me an idea of where you think AI is gonna be twelve months out. I mean, the way it moves, it’s moving so fast that twelve months from now it’s gonna be very different, right?

Woody Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. Well, things that I feel very good about for the next twelve months is that I think, you know, look at your phone right now. Within twelve months, you are gonna have a local intelligence that is running by itself on your phone, which is largely equivalent to the intelligence that we have with these models, say, at the beginning of the year.

Woody Taylor: We’ll say Opus 4.6, for those of you that play some inside baseball, or GPT 4.5 or 5.5. I think we’ll have that kind of local intelligence on our phone. That part I feel pretty good about. Two years from now, I think most people, if they want to, will be able to set up their own AI environments, and that’s something that, you know, you and I have talked about quite a bit in terms of a roadmap for businesses.

Woody Taylor: As near as I can tell, with the way the costs go, with the way the costs are coming down for various things, even though we’re gonna deal with the spike in prices over the next year and a half or so for AI, all the trajectory is, is that two to three years from now, a homeowner or business owner is going to be able to set up local intelligence in their businesses and not have to interact necessarily with these more powerful companies that are out there unless they need to pull in additional computation like utility.

Woody Taylor: We are going to utility model with this stuff. And I think those are relatively safe predictions to make for the next year or two in terms of opportunities. In terms of impact, Jon, I simply don’t know how things will be impacted out at a granular level. I can… I feel pretty good about calling stuff until about 2030, but one thing that we have learned in this decade is that the technical capability of these tools is we lag far behind that in terms of our ability to deploy and implement and use that technology.

Woody Taylor: You know, there’s plenty of stuff that ChatGPT could do a year ago that I still can’t get turned on at businesses because of concerns about the model, which I completely appreciate. You know, everybody’s still figuring this stuff out. But there is a technical debt that we accrue about every day. As this stuff keeps pushing further and further and further, it’s gonna take us eight to 10 years to catch up with that kind of technical capability that’s out there.

Woody Taylor: So I’m pretty murky a- after about 18 months. Yeah.

Jon Meyer: Well, and to that point, going back to what we talked about early on, these models are more powerful than our human behavior. Like, this is a lot of behavior change that has to happen. Just– I just know here i-in the business even, teaching someone to use their voice instead of typing, and they get such a richer answer, and it blows their mind.

Jon Meyer: And then they, and then they keep trying it in different ways, and then they come back and they’re like, “I never knew it could do that.” It could always do it. It, it was your problem, not the c- not the machine’s problem.

Woody Taylor: Right. Yeah. It is… Well, the other day I was, like, in a Codex session- And, you know, I get a lot of repetitive technical questions.

Woody Taylor: And so I had Codex, and this was pretty cool. This is a ChatGPT product that does a lot of, you know, fast coding. Just off a couple of prompts, it was able to build something that would compile a video and show you click by click, screen by screen how a user could do this kind of task or that kind of task.

Woody Taylor: Pretty cool. But to make that work, I had it go out to some voice, some voice site called ElevenLabs, pull down a clone of my voice, and it literally wrote the whole script, synced over the whole video. Amazing stuff. But the voice didn’t sound very good. So then I just asked Codex, “Well, can’t I just put some sort of LLM on my computer that will handle that voice stuff locally?”

Woody Taylor: So now right on my computer, I’ve got a, a little AI model that is just very good at saying things in my voice that it now uses to build these whole script. And that whole notion of engagement and seeing where can it go, why this rather than that, that’s so cool when I use my voice, I get richer answers.

Woody Taylor: That exploration, that could take us so many different directions in the future. Everybody’s gonna find these cool little emergent use cases for them, and I couldn’t be more excited about that. It’s really… It’s just gonna be fun. It’ll be scary and freaky, but I think we’ll also have a lot of fun too.

Jon Meyer: That tells me I gotta talk to you with video on at all times, so I don’t know it’s you.

Woody Taylor: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s, I’m not that far off from being able to simulate myself in a meeting. But, but right now I still attend them live, but go ahead.

Jon Meyer: So let’s– As we wrap it up, I just wanna ask, like, what am I missing?

Jon Meyer: What have I not asked you that you’re like, “Oh, you got… People should know this,” or, “It’s heading in this direction,” or what, what am I not asking?

Woody Taylor: I think- The biggest thing, you know, how to explore these tools. You know, we talked about use conversation, speak neutrally to them and things like that. But what I would en-really encourage people to do, especially those people that are skeptical about these tools, and again, you can be against AI, you can be pro-AI.

Woody Taylor: I get both points of view. I think everybody should know how to use these tools. That’s really kind of my onus. I just want people to know how to use them, regardless of where you sit on the sandbox, because it’s gonna be used against us ultimately with where things are going. So I want people to be able to use these tools.

Woody Taylor: And really the thing that we often skip over is when you put somebody in front of these tools for the first time, I always encourage them, if you have deep domain experience in anything, and it can be accounting, it can be largemouth bass fishing, something you know a lot about, that should be where you start with these tools, just talking to it back and forth about this topic.

Woody Taylor: Building confidence that, oh, if I explain things using these big formal words that only I use because I’ve been doing this thirty years, it starts to throw these big formal words back at me. You know, get a sense of how well it’s able to meet you in terms of its intellectual capability, as well as, as its ability to reflect and augment things that you’re thinking.

Woody Taylor: So this is not a sexy what am I missing thing whatsoever. It really is just an endorsement. As folks sit down in front of these tools, take them deep with stuff that you know a lot about. You will be surprised by how much these things know and how easily they are able to explain things to you. So, you know, what do you do with that?

Woody Taylor: There was a book by Neal Stephenson in the late 1990s, what was it? A Diamond… Was it Diamond Age? I should be able to remember the name of it. But basically, the whole premise of the book was that there was this poor girl who found a book that got– that fell out of a rich person’s luggage compartment or something like that, and this book was basically a codex, a guide through life.

Woody Taylor: It knew all this stuff. It could give good recommendations. It basically interacted with this. And the entire rest of the novel is just how this girl went to grow up. And anyways, I won’t spoil it for anybody. You know, we all have that codex right now, you know. So what are we missing? Every single person on Earth with a mobile phone has the ability to speak with something that has a tested-out IQ of around 130 to 145.

Woody Taylor: Why wouldn’t we want to jump in and explore that just for the sake of exploring it, if nothing else? Because that exploration, being curious with these tools, just opens up so many more different ways that you can use them for your own benefit. And mostly, I just wanna encourage people, even if you hate this stuff, even if you dread where we’re going, get in and be curious and just at least understand the logic and how these tools tend to work.

Woody Taylor: So

Jon Meyer: Couldn’t agree more. Well, with that, Woody, I’m gonna ask us to be done for the day. I’ll probably have you on again- … to dig into some more stuff ’cause you and I can go on forever. But-

Woody Taylor: Yeah …

Jon Meyer: just so that people, if they do have questions and wanna reach out to you, what’s your website or communication method of choice?

Woody Taylor: Absolutely, yeah. Folks can always go to my website, paramis.ai, P-A-R-A-M-I-S dot A-I. I’ve got a lot of different case studies out there if people wanna see the kind of work that is being done out there, general commentary on other things. And you can certainly reach out to me directly over email, woody@paramis.ai.

Woody Taylor: And I would always encourage people to reach out. There’s no dumb questions. I am really am just trying to educate and bring people along this journey as much as anything else, and I always love hearing how people are trying to use these AI tools. So feel free to drop me a line, just about anything that’s on your mind.

Jon Meyer: I really appreciate that, Woody. And for those of you that are interested in looking at some of the other podcasts coming out of BGM, feel free to t- check it out at bgm360.com. And everyone, thank you for listening. And Woody, thank you for jumping on today. Everyone, have a great day.

Woody Taylor: Thanks for your time.

Woody Taylor: Take care, everybody.

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