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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Rundown for another weekend deep dive. Today I'm talking with Life Abraham, the co CEO and co founder of Public.com, the company behind this very show. Outside of the show, Public also has an incredible investing platform and they've been on a tear lately, launching new features on a weekly basis. In fact, they recently became the first brokerage to bring AI agents directly to investor portfolios. So in today's conversation, we talked about the role that AI agents will play when it comes to investing, the best way for investors to use agents, and a big picture look at the impact that AI will have on investors. This was a great conversation. I think you guys will really enjoy it. So let's get into it. Life Abraham, welcome to the Rundown.
- [00:48]
B
What's up Z?
- [00:49]
A
What's up? For anyone who doesn't know, Life is the co founder and co CEO of Public, who's the company behind this very show. So I'm happy we could finally get you on the podcast.
- [00:59]
B
Could finally use it for some self promotion. Look at that.
- [01:01]
A
Yeah, I know. It's about time. It's about time. So let's talk about some of the cool stuff that that Public is doing. I mean, I feel like you guys are releasing new features on a weekly basis and the one that caught everyone's attention recently was the AI agents. You know, you guys became the first brokerage to release AI agents. Now, I'm not gonna lie to you, Life, I feel like every app these days is trying to integrate AI into their product. So I'm kind of curious to hear from you. Why are AI agents going to be a game changer for investors?
- [01:32]
B
Yeah, obviously as public, we are focused on people that are actually truly building their portfolio, not just like gambling in the markets and so on. You can do that if you like, but generally speaking, we're designing for the person that is trying to compound their wealth over time. And in that specifically, we believe AI has, can. Can play a massive role in really helping people manage their portfolios through the markets and therefore also just like level up their own sophistication, you know. And AI agents specifically, obviously are a tool for automation in most cases. Right. So agents of the public essentially mean that you can automate any workflow in your portfolio. That can be a trading strategy. There can be money movements, there can be alerts around certain events that might happen. And therefore, you know, you can basically have like a little bit more sophisticated, you know, touch on your portfolio than you might have had before.
- [02:27]
A
You know, I got access to the Agents, you know, when you guys launched it and I've been messing around with it. The hard part though is figuring out like what it can do because you can go in so many different directions. So I'm still trying to figure out the best use case for it. The what I've used it to do is like figure out dip buying opportunities if a certain stock drops under a certain rsi, things like that. What do you expect will be the most popular use case for these agents?
- [02:50]
B
The most popular is what we're already seeing it is really trading strategies. I think everyone has these general ideas in their head and these like unstructured strategies, sometimes call it internally and you know, many times it's just people lack the skills or like the last piece of, you know, like a financial knowledge for lack of better wording to like really put these things into action. And that is really where, you know, AI can really help, you know, bridge that gap. Because the one example we always make right now is there's a lot of people who have a general understanding of covered calls and the understanding of like, hey, I can generate some income with covered calls, but then actually executing on that and actually, you know, putting this into action is really hard for people and you know, picking the right contracts, you know, what the income potential is, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so now you can just check with the agent and basically ask them like, hey, look at my portfolio, tell me what kind of income potential is there? You know, and you know, maybe I could generate, you know, two, three, four, $5,000 a year a month in the premiums here and then you can use it as a sparring part that actually figured that out and then know, create that into like a little strategy and that can execute in your portfolio. Right? Or you mentioned dip buying. Like we see a lot of that happening where people are like, hey, you know, if a certain stock or if the S and P is, you know, trading, you know, like call it, you know, 2% below its, you know, 200 day moving average, start buying, you know, at these amounts and these time increments, for example. And there's like all these things that people kind of have in their head that they like to execute on that they now can just automate. This is also like the markets are becoming more and more 24 7, so to say, right? Just like in crypto specifically, obviously it's already 24 7. But also even on public you can start with things like from 4am to 8pm you can trade. And so there's a lot of these windows now as well, where people are just not glued to the screen all the time. And so just having the ability to automate a lot of these things is what we're seeing most people are kind of excited about.
- [05:00]
A
Yeah, I mean the first thing that I did when I got access to it, I just asked it to like just analyze my portfolio and just kind of tell me what it thought about it. And it's like, hey, you're too overweight this, too underweight this. And so just having that conversation was good. And then from there you can kind of expand and so it's just, you know, because it's still so new, I'm still just trying to find the best use case for it. So I'm really excited to see how people end up utilizing this stuff, especially for trading strategies. But what I did get a little bit, a little bit worried about when I first saw the feature launch was like, like the safeguards around it, you know, these, obviously these LLMs have gotten incredibly powerful, really good. But I mean the models still hallucinate. So how have you guys thought about like the safeties and the safeguards around, around these? So it doesn't just go in like YOLO into zero day options because of, I don't know, I just thought that I needed to get some exposure to high risk stuff and just buy some zero day options and there you go.
- [05:47]
B
Yeah, I mean first it's designed to only do what you told it to do. And in order to make that possible, we essentially separated the reasoning from the execution. And what that means is you use the AI to help you like, you know, in creating a strategy and coming up with it and refining it. But then as the strategy is developed, it is essentially set in stone and deterministic. And then that deterministic strategy executes only within the, you know, guidelines that you've set. And you can literally edit everything as you want and you can just like approve it once it's done. And, but like it can't deviate from that. And we think that is very important because exactly to your point, like people will think about agents and they will think about openclaw, right? Like for instance, like I have this Mac Mini on my, you know, desk thing here that I still haven't set up finally. But, and, and, but like this Mac Mini kind of concept exists because when people think about AI agents, they think about this. The sense of like, I want to have it in an isolated environment because I don't fully trust it yet. I don't know what it will do maybe suddenly. And so it was very important for us that we build it in a way that it can't deviate from the strategy you have set up. And so it doesn't have own reasoning once it's created essentially. And that kind of takes that risk out of it. The other thing we think is very important is like over communication. And so once an agent is set up, you see every action that it takes as well as every action it might skip. So that's like, let's say it's checked some trigger that you've set up and then decided to not do anything because it didn't actually hit the specific things that you were looking for. You will see all that in the agent's history. And so this over communication of knowing exactly every single little thing that it does or didn't do. We think it's also very important to just build trust over time as well, that you really know and learn even as you use them, that it truly can't do something that you didn't tell to do beforehand.
- [07:54]
A
I'm glad you guys have thought about that because, you know, when the whole open claw stuff was going viral, you know, back in January or whatever, you would see these tweets of people saying it just deleted all my photos or like it started replying to all these emails. And I'm like, that's kind of scary. But the fact that you guys have kind of thought about it in the safeguards and stuff I think is good. And I think over time as people build trust, you know, we. People trust their cars to like drive themselves. I think over time people are going to trust AIs and stuff to start, you know, executing trading strategy. So that's good.
- [08:20]
B
But I think there is a really this aspect of that. Obviously trust is earned and not just given in that regard, but there is really, you know, because we've created it into this deterministic kind of, you know, workflow at the end that like the I kind of creates. It creates also the sense where you can now actually use it for real things, like for real strategies with real money behind it. And I think right now a lot of the agent use case you see out there are still very much in this, you know, kind of scientific side project world, you know, and it is exactly because of this open floor kind of, kind of like, kind of concept, but because they have their own reasoning even once they're out into the world. And so this separation of reasoning and execution makes it possible for it to even use it in a brokerage account in the first place. And that is just like that design piece is really the core infrastructural kind of, I'll call it innovation, but the core infrastructural kind of idea that we've created there to make sure that you can actually trust it.
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A
It's actually the first time I've used an AI agent to do something for me. Because you know how you showed your Mac Mini? I actually did get a Mac Mini. Well, when the whole open cloth thing was happening, I started setting it up and I'm like, what am I going to use this for? Like, I don't. I can reply to emails myself, like this is not going to be useful for me and maybe I wasn't being creative enough. But with this you can actually see it execute on stuff. And it's like the first time that I felt like, okay, this is like, this is real. And that brings me to a bigger point here. Like, you know, everyone talks about how AI agents, like is going to like unlock the value of AI and how like, you know, Nvidia is not over overvalued because of AI agents and AI agents is what's really carrying the next phase of AI. Do you, do you, do you also see it that way or do you think that, I mean, you're investing in this stuff? Are AI agents finally easing the fear of an AI bubble?
- [10:17]
B
In a way, I would say yes, because I think we've transcended from this point where AI was just augmenting labor to AI becoming labor. And that can sound scary in one regard because you're suddenly thinking about basically people's jobs being replaced and so on. But even in this, like, even if you look at what agents in public do now, we always have a lot of conversations internally of, you know, what is the value a financial advisor provides. And we're looking at that in these like three buckets, right? It's the grunt work of trade, setting up a trading strategy, tax source harvesting, you know, these things. And it's like advice, which is essentially like, you know, opinions on the back of data and market movements and articles and you know, things like that. And then the third is like emotional support, like who do you call when everything is red? And you know, I freak out and my anxiety is at all time highs. And if you now look at agents and what we've built within public and agents, it does one already. So one of three of these components of what a financial advisor does for you already now is being done by agents. And we think each of These pieces is going to be tackled by AI agents at some point as well. And that is now something that I think is entirely possible. And not just possible as a future vision, but possible, I would say within the next 18 months.
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A
Oh, wow.
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B
And so I think that is where, at least in our space, I see that agents really have unlocked a little bit like that next level of possibilities with AI for sure.
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A
Do you, I'm kind of curious, like how do you feel like the entire finance industry as a whole will change? Because you know, we've had algorithmic trading for, for, you know, decades now. Do you feel like with AI agents, I guess I'll ask it this way. Do you feel like the, the gap between retail and institutional investors will close because of AI agents or maybe even widen? Because I imagine these hedge funds and these trade shops have access to even more powerful agents and they can throw more compute at some of these problems.
- [12:29]
B
Yeah, it's always like we always get thrown this question of retail versus institutions. And I always bring it back to, I don't think there is a versus here. I don't think they're competing in some regard. And I think that narrative is not necessarily true. And I think a big part of it is that they are running on very different incentives. Like some hedge fund essentially runs on annual returns and if you're an hedge fund manager somewhere, you will get your bonus payment in Q1 for the performance of last year and you will make your decisions on the back of that and that will drive your day to day decisions and how you view the markets and so on. In most cases, I'm generalizing here now for retail investors, you invest your life savings and you will likely want those to compound over, over time. You might buy a house at some point or have some larger purchases, a wedding, whatever might come up like, okay, but generally speaking, your goal is to basically, you know, create a more secure future for yourself and your kids and your retirement and whatever ultimate your, your, your, your goals might be. And so the, the, the, the horizon that you're investing with, I think for most retail investors just way further. And so therefore you're likely more in a buy and hold perspective. You are likely more trying to be smart around when you're buying, you know, or when you're cycling in and out of positions based off, you know, beliefs that might have shifted around certain companies and so on, but you're generally looking at a way longer, you know, period. And so the incentives are very different. Therefore I'm like, and therefore the strategies and tools and Stuff that you use I think are very different. And so like, I never look at it really as like competition and so on. And so therefore, I think what agents now and AI in general does for the retail investor is really much more than just helps them to be more sophisticated. Like if you were someone who was fairly passive, you now have the ability to maybe be more active, but be more active on a more programmatic level. So where it's not active on emotions and day trading and then you're going to lose a bunch of money because you're making some emotional quick decisions on some charts going on, but, but because you set up some strategy that then is more active on your behalf because you are not glued to a screen or so on. And if you're already an active trader, you might suddenly have the ability to act like algorithmic API trader without needing to know how to code. And so it kind of moves everyone up in their sophistication. And that is really where I would say we see these tools to be very powerful for people. I mean, you guys being like, you know, leveling the playing field, so to say against institution. I don't think that's really how people would think about it.
- [15:12]
A
I like that framing where it's like it's not institutions versus retail, it's retail just trying to extract as much returns as they can. And you guys are giving them the tools to maximize the returns by, you know, giving them all these research tools, what have you. I mean, you've kind of been through, you know, all the cycles over the last five years. We had the GameStop stuff and then the crash in 2022 and all, you know, now we're AI frenzy. Now we're on the second phase of that. How do you feel like retail investors have evolved? Do you feel like retail investors are, are trying to be more active traders? Because, you know, there's this whole school of thought just saying, hey, throw your money into a passive etf, call it a day, you're good. Don't try to, don't try to compete with the active trading. But do you feel like that's starting to change? You feel like more people want to be active because they think they can extract more value to not just, you know, and also it's kind of fun to try to like, you know, extract value from the market.
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B
Yeah, and I think there's also age plays a big role. I think the younger you are, the more active you might play. Just also because you're learning and, you know, you just learn a little bit more by being active in the markets. And I think if, if you're younger, that is obviously just looking at the returns of a lifetime has less risk there attached. And if you're doing that right before retirement, so. Right, true. And I think the other piece is that this generation, for lack of better wording, like this generation of like digital natives who like, grew up with the Internet around and so on, they've just grown, grown up with, with much more financial literacy earlier in their lives. Social media, podcasts like this one, you know, like, there's niche communities, I always bring up, like there's niche communities around dividend investing. And I'm always like, how can you talk about dividend investing so much? But apparently you can. And they have millions of followers, right? And so, like, there's just so much more content out there. It's so much easier to gain financial literacy. But it's also easier to gain financial literacy because people have the ability to be active in the markets earlier in their lives. Because there's fractional stocks now you can sign up for a brokerage account immediately because there's KYC systems where you can just like, you know, have identity verification within seconds and not because some guy at a bank faxes a statement and process it manually throughout the next two weeks. You know, and there's all these innovations that have compounded over the last few decades, you know, that have made it possible for a whole generation grow up having the ability to be earlier in the markets, but also to be more active in the markets earlier in their lives and have more financial literacy earlier in their lives. And therefore they have more confidence in their abilities as investors. And I think all that leads to people also having more of a idea about certain companies and certain trends. And that's why, you see, I think a lot of retail investors kind of rally behind certain, you know, certain themes that might feel like they understand or specific companies, you know, and so on, because they're just deeper in it than previous generations have been. And I think this notion of, like, also, hey, I just want to put myself into an ETF and you know, don't do anything, that's completely fine. But I think that comes also from the thought of not necessarily having an idea on the markets, not necessarily having an idea on certain companies, you know, and there's nothing bad about that, but I do feel there's just a generation that, that is more confident and has more of a feeling and understanding of certain companies and trends, and they want to, you know, execute on that to potentially outperform the markets.
- [18:37]
A
I also think there's an element of like people that started off with just passive investing, whether it's through like a 401k had, they had through work and whatnot and they get exposure to the market and now that financial headlines are everywhere, now they see their portfolio, you know, kind of change with, with the, with the economic environment and then that kind of gives them the, the, the itch to kind of dig a little bit further. Single my 401k went up this much. What can I do to either do better or de risk and all that stuff? I think so. I think that because more and more people are getting access to the markets early on just from passive investing through 401ks and Roth IRAs, it's getting more and more people like you know, exposure to the market, which is like increasing awareness, which is a lot of people like even into their 30s are trying to then like trying to become more active when it comes to their day to day management of their portfolios.
- [19:23]
B
Totally. And also the markets are way more in the news nowadays. Right, exactly. Everyone's selling stocks right now. We have a president who talks about the markets like every few weeks. He sees it as a scoreboard potentially.
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A
Right, exactly.
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B
And so even culturally I think the markets just have, you know, have, have kind of spread its way way further into just society in general.
- [19:47]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Now I do want to ask about, you know, you mentioned about how more young people are investing in the markets. Young people are also gambling more and you know, get it gambling via prediction markets. And I want to kind of talk more about that, you know, public. You guys released a really funny ad not too long ago, you know, taking shots at other brokerages that kind of incorporate media, social, sports betting essentially into the investing, into their investing app. But I'm kind of curious to get your take on like prediction markets as a whole because you know there's, there's some elements of prediction markets that you can say could be used for, you know, smart hedging and not just gambling. So do you, do you ever see prediction markets coming to public and how do you feel about that in general?
- [20:29]
B
Yeah. So first off, prediction markets, AKA event contracts have been around for some time, right. Like beginning 90s with like, you know, weather contracts for commodities traders and all that stuff. And so these things happen around.
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A
Remember binary options back in the day? I remember binary options were a thing like it was, it was very similar to.
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B
Yeah, I mean that's, that is a whole. That is a. Yeah, it is, it is quite similar. You're actually quite right that I would say risky stuff now. But long story short, there is. And so they have been around for some time I think now it's just that the ins, like the use of the instrument is being stretched and it's being stretched into sports betting, into betting on Dancing with the Stars and whatever it might be, you know, and, and, and let's be straight, like in our eyes like that has nothing to do with investing and it shouldn't be in your investment account. You know, hey, sports betting can be fun, like all good. I've done it myself. But I don't have to have that where my life savings are. Like I much rather deposit 50 bucks here and there and like, you know, have some fun. Get the dopamine hit and move and move on. That's, you know, everyone their own. Okay, if you like that. But we do think that should not play a role as part of your investing account. I think that's a very kind of risky proposition to like mix this onto the same place. Now I do think that there's certain event contracts that have some good use especially for more sophisticated investors and like, but those contracts are very new and they're just, you know, kind of coming and it's like more these like securities based events contracts or like KPI markets they're called sometimes now. And that falls into basically the ability to dissect company performance into specific KPIs. Like let's say, you know, Tesla has multiple business units now, right? It's a car company, it's energy company, it's robotics company, like whatever, you know, point of view you have, whatever business you're looking at. But like you might have a really good understanding of the energy business and how much kilowatts of battery storage they have shipped last quarter and so on. And you might have a very good view on that because you might be in the industry or you have some sort of knowledge that is just like other people might not have because you've studied it or whatever the reason might be. And so you might have something where you could literally sit down and create a beautiful forecast model that has all the great variables that no one else has. And you want to now place a trade on that outcome, but you don't want that to be impacted by the model Y shipping numbers to be down last quarter. And so having the ability to kind of dissect earnings calls and therefore kind of play to certain strengths you might have I think is a totally fine instrument. And that can play a role in someone's investing and trading strategies. But again, these are still, these are sophisticated tools. You know, the same like doing some, you know, multi level options trade is a sophisticated thing to do. Right. And that is not fit for everyone. But there are people that, you know, can extract value out of these tools. And so like, I think that can be fine. But just blanketly, you know, looking at prediction markets and basically putting sports betting and Dancing with the Stars in the same camp as, you know, having a trade on the energy business of Tesla, I think is stretching it.
- [23:48]
A
Yeah, I agree. I think that's my biggest problem with it is like the idea sounds great. Especially when it comes to like, what is the Fed going to do with interest rates, what are the CPI numbers going to be, things like that. And then you add in the fact that, you know, what's the top show on Netflix going to be and then it becomes like, what are we doing here? So I'm glad that you're thinking about that because. Yeah, I mean, how many times does it happen where a company reports earnings, crushes it on all metrics and the stock drops 4%. It's like what happened because some executive said something weird on the earnings call and the stock's down. So then it hurts. This is great. I mean fly. This was great. I really appreciate you coming on. Long time coming. I'm happy that you made the time and hopefully we can do this again in the near future. The last question I have for you, you guys have been releasing a lot of features for the last few months. What's the next big one that we have to keep an eye on that we should keep an eye out for that public is going to release. Just give us a sneak peek. Give the people a sneak peek on what, what we should be working on.
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B
The keyword for the sneak peek. And it sounds really weird to say it like this is. I would call it essentially free money. If I now don't have your attention,
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A
then I don't know, you have my attention. Essentially free money. Okay. We will keep an eye out for the essentially free money. Maybe we can. Come on. You can come on when that drops and we can talk more about that.
- [25:06]
B
Fantastic.
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A
Great stuff live. I appreciate you coming on. And we got to do this again in the near future.
- [25:13]
B
Cool. Also awesome for everything you're doing, man. It's been a pleasure to see the rundown grow and I think it's phenomenal what you and Mike and Connor are all building here. It's awesome. Just saying. Very proud of the growth of this
- [25:29]
A
thing and we couldn't do it without the backing from you guys, so we appreciate that as well. And, you know, we're just going to keep. We're going to keep this going, and the audience loves it as well. So, I mean, you know, we. We can't, you know, we're going to keep this going as long as we can.
- [25:42]
B
Awesome.
- [25:45]
A
Well, all right, guys. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Life Abraham. Now, I like how Life talked about the dynamics between retail investors and institutional investors. I also like this take on prediction markets, and I'm really curious to see what new features that Public is going to be launching later this year. Let me know what you guys thought about today's conversation by dropping a comment on Spotify and YouTube. And if you haven't tried out the AI agent feature yet on Public, definitely go check it out. Thank you guys again for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes, and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.