Don't Give AI Your Bank Account Yet

The Machine

Everybody take a breath. It is going to be okay. But there are two moves you should make this week, and neither one costs a dime.

I know how it sounds out there right now. The headlines make it look like the stock market, the AI companies and the whole fancy world are folding in on themselves. Some of that is noise. Some of it is real. Panic does not help you sort out which is which. A plan does.

So here is the plan, the way I would hand it to my own family. Move one: keep your AI away from your money for now. Move two: build a secret passphrase with the people you love, so a voice on the phone can never talk you out of your savings. Everything else in this piece is the why behind those two moves, plus how I actually use these tools to get smarter instead of dumber.

Move one: keep AI out of your bank accounts, for now

First things first. Are you protected? I mean protected in the plain sense. Does your AI have access to your bank accounts or your credit cards?

Maybe you were an early adopter. Good for you. Maybe you said, you know what, I am going to hook ChatGPT or Claude or whoever up to my bank and my cards so it can do some recon and tell me where I stand. I get the appeal. A machine that reads every statement and tells you where the leaks are sounds like a gift.

Stop that. Just for a little while. Let us see how all of this shakes out first.

Here is why. The systems that protect our data are not always as tight as we were told. We mostly trust the companies running the machine, and most of the time that trust is earned. But there have been reports of thieves, allegedly including groups tied to North Korea, getting into cryptocurrency systems and walking off with money that was supposed to be locked down. I am not an expert on how that particular break happened. I do not need to be. The lesson is the same one I learned in 20 years with the LAPD: the more doors you open into your house, the more doors somebody can come through.

Every connection you give an AI tool is another door. A login it can use. A token it holds. A pile of statements sitting on somebody else's server. Most days nothing happens. The day something does happen, it is your rent money.

It is bad enough that our credit cards are already stored in every system on earth. You do not have to start adding bank accounts and routing numbers so your AI can go swimming in your financial documents. Not yet. When it comes to our money, we have to be protective.

Why the money world feels shaky right now

Part of the nervous energy comes from a group of companies people call neoclouds. These are the outfits that went out and bought huge numbers of AI chips so they could rent them out to everybody else. Big idea, big money, and a lot of it borrowed.

Here is the catch. Those chips lose value over time. They only last a few years before something faster makes them old news. And from what is being reported, a lot of chips are sitting in warehouses with nothing being done with them. I would bet somebody out there is already trying to figure out where those warehouses are.

Compare that to real estate, which is the world I have worked in for 28 years. A house in Santa Clarita gets built pretty much the way houses have always been built. Concrete, rebar, wood framing, stucco or siding. There are improvements here and there, better fireproofing, new materials, but a house is a house. And a house sits on land.

They say God is not making any more land. I know, beaches come and go. But the middle of Oklahoma is not growing. That is why real estate has carried a long track record of getting more expensive over time. The land does not wear out.

A chip does wear out. So when somebody tells you a warehouse full of AI chips is the same kind of safe bet as land, do not panic, but do not swallow it either. Those are two different animals.

Diamandis or Zitron? Do your own analysis

If you follow this stuff, you have probably run into two loud voices on opposite ends.

On one side is Peter Diamandis. He is the optimist, the angel on the shoulder, the guy who sees abundance coming for everybody. On the other side is Ed Zitron, who looks at a lot of this and calls it a con, a bubble, a big joke that ends badly.

Where should you be? Somewhere you thought your way to. Not somewhere a podcast parked you.

Maybe you do not use AI in your daily routine at all. Maybe you do not use it in your business. Maybe you use it like Google, asking it questions and having it teach you things. It is pretty good at that. Wherever you are, do your own analysis. Listen to both sides, then check what each one says against what you can actually see in your own life and your own bank account.

How I use AI to learn faster

People ask me how I keep up. Here is one of my favorite moves, and you do not need to be technical to pull it off.

Let us say there is somebody on YouTube you like listening to. Not because of their voice. We have enough of that. Because of what they say. Maybe it is Mo Gawdat on the future. Maybe it is Alex Hormozi on sales. Maybe it is Dan Martell on running a business. Whoever it is, they have hundreds of videos, and you will never have time to watch them all.

You do not have to. Here is the sequence I use.

What do you want out of it? Do you want to learn the material? Do you want summaries? Do you want scripts so you can talk intelligently about where that person stands? Do you want to understand how a futurist thinks so you can get better at seeing what comes next?

Let us say you are not a natural futurist. You are not sure how to look at today and guess at tomorrow. Search YouTube for AI futurists, load the page, pull the links, drop them into a notebook, and have your assistant interview the whole stack for you. You will watch it work in the window, asking questions and pulling answers. It is a diligent worker. Then it hands you what you came for.

That is a leveling-up sequence. A few hours of setup and you have a study partner that has absorbed hundreds of hours of the people you respect.

Don't let it kiss your butt

There is a fear going around that AI is going to make us dumber. I do not think it has to. But it will if you stop thinking.

It will make you dumber if you do not read what it spits out. If you do not question it. If you do not push back. If you let it tell you every idea you have came straight from God's mouth to your ear, through the AI, and out to the public.

A lot of the time, what it tells you is nonsense dressed up nicely. Its job, in part, is to keep you happy enough that you do not jump ship. A machine that agrees with everything you say is not a partner. It is a mirror with a subscription fee.

So push back. Ask it what is wrong with your idea. Ask it for the strongest argument against you. Ask it to check its own math. If it never disagrees with you, you are using it wrong.

I wrote more about running two models against each other so neither one gets to be your yes-man in Which AI Should You Use? Run Two Against Each Other.

Don't get stuck on one AI

I will admit something. I have a few different AI subscriptions. It is like buying domain names. Oh, that is a good idea, let us grab that one. None of them ever made me any money, but I bought them all.

If you are that way with AI, fine. Playing the field has value. But understand the game. These companies want you sticky. They want you to stay. That is how the business works.

My advice: find one you really like and dig in deeper than an Alabama tick. Learn it well. But stay nimble enough to move. Your favorite could get shut down. A government could step in and decide it wants control of it. The company could change its rules overnight. If that happens, you want to be able to jump to something else without losing your work or your mind.

That means keeping your important prompts, notes and files somewhere you own. Not just inside one company's chat history.

Check the guru's real numbers

I was talking with a friend of mine who is also in real estate about how each of us actually uses AI in the businesses we run. Two different businesses, same lesson. And he brought up something brilliant.

The internet is full of people selling you the shortcut. How I made a million dollars. Join my program, pay me every month, and I will get you there too. In our world it is the agent with a fancy address who promises to help you hit a million dollars in a year if you just join his group.

Here is the thing. Those of us with a real estate license can look up an agent's actual production in the MLS. So when somebody says I closed 100 deals last year, it is right there in the system. And sometimes you look, and the number is three.

Three is not 100. Is anybody paying attention?

AI makes this worse and better at the same time. Worse, because anybody can now produce a slick video, a polished sales page and a stack of fake-looking proof in an afternoon. Better, because you can use the same tools to check the claim. Before you pay anybody for the secret, find the record that would prove it, and look.

And if you are the one selling, do not lie to people. Once people find out you have been feeding them a line, they are done with you. I do not care what generation they are from. Brand new on the planet or here since World War II, nobody likes being played.

The Anchor

Move two: build a family passphrase

One final thing, and it is the most important thing in this whole piece.

Sit down with the people you love. Your spouse, your kids, your parents, your closest friend. And build a passphrase. A short set of words that only you and they know.

Why? Because the phone call is coming. Maybe not to you, but to somebody you love. And it is going to sound real.

The call that sounds like family

Here is how it plays out. The phone rings. Hey Jack, it is Connor. Hey Connor, how are you? Listen, I am in a Mexican jail. I need to get bailed out. Can you Western Union me some money? The officer standing right here is going to help me out. He takes the money and lets me go, and I can get back home to the family.

And he is naming the names. Names you know. Names that make it real.

So you say, okay, give me the phrase. And the voice says, oh, the phrase, I cannot remember right now. These guys are going to hurt me. I know we talked about it that one time. I just cannot think of it.

That is the moment. You have to be strong. You have to say, I am sorry. No phrase, no money.

The Federal Trade Commission has warned that scammers are using AI voice cloning to make these family emergency calls sound like the real person. A few seconds of someone's voice from a video online can be enough to fake it. The names are easy too. A lot of families have them sitting on public social media profiles.

A cloned voice can copy how your son sounds. It cannot copy a phrase that was never spoken where a microphone could hear it.

How to set it up the right way

This is where most people get lazy, and lazy is how it fails.

I know I sound like a lunatic with the shower running. But think about what is on the line. A mistake here could cost your savings. In a real emergency, a mistake could cost a lot more.

And the phrase works in both directions. If your loved one really is in trouble and they give you the valid phrase, now you know it is real. Now you can act fast and get help moving instead of wasting precious minutes trying to figure out whether you are being played.

Will AI someday read the envelope through the paper, or catch the whisper some other way? Maybe. I know it is coming. Until we are all wearing something on our melons that reads our thoughts, a phrase spoken in private and kept in your head is about as safe as it gets. And if they ever do invent the mind reader, I am just going to eat more cantaloupe.

I have gone deeper on this one before. If you want the full family playbook, read the family safe phrase that beats a voice clone scam and Is That Really Your Grandkid?

It is not the AI. It is the people using it.

Be careful out there. It is getting exciting, and I think it is going to get more exciting. But I do not think AI is what ends us. I think it is human beings using AI to make trouble.

The people at the top keep calling what is coming a little uncomfortable. A bit of a rough patch. For them, maybe. For the rest of us, those little tickles are going to mean a lot. A rough patch for a billionaire is a lost house for a family in Canyon Country.

So here is my call to all the fancy people up top. The early investors, the venture capitalists, the folks who want to be gods with this technology. I hear you talking about this uncomfortable stretch. So let us do this. Let us all put our heads together and figure out how to get everybody at the bottom of the elevator shaft, all of us in the middle and below, through the mess you keep describing.

Let us make the uncomfortable time disappear. Get the transition right for everybody, including the people at the top. I think we can do that. I think every one of us could sign up for getting through this with as little damage as possible.

That is a plan worth building. I have written about who should carry that load in Moonshots Decoded Part 1: Who Pays for the Uncomfortable Part.

What to do this week

Let me boil it down so you can act on it tonight.

• Disconnect your bank, cards and payment apps from every AI tool. Revisit it later.
• Stop pasting account numbers into chats.
• Turn on two-step login for your bank and your email.
• Pick one AI to learn well. Keep your important work somewhere you own.
• Make it argue with you. Never trust a yes-man, human or machine.
• Check the record before you pay anybody for the secret.
• Build your family passphrase in private, practice it, and agree on the rule: no phrase, no money.

Two moves. No cost. And either one could be the thing that saves somebody you love from a very bad day.

Keep your money behind a locked door, and keep your phrase in your head. That's AI With Honor. I'm Connor with honor, and I'll see you in the next one.