Investing and Staying Sane in the Modern World with LevelFields’ Andrew Einhorn

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Leading the Charge in Event Proven Stock Trading with AI.

Andrew Einhorn, the visionary CEO of LevelFields, has a unique background that perfectly positions him to revolutionize the financial technology landscape. With degrees in neuropsychology and biological anthropology from Emory University, Andrew’s academic journey initially steered him toward a career in medicine. However, his profound interest in statistics and human behavior led him to explore different avenues. His early professional experiences included conducting research for the Department of Veterans Affairs and working as an epidemiologist, where he analyzed cancer clusters in contaminated communities. This foundation in data analysis and research laid the groundwork for his future endeavors in fintech.

Before founding LevelFields, Andrew was instrumental in creating pandemic monitoring systems and other high-impact projects. His role as a senior consultant at ICF International involved working on significant projects, such as assessing the long-term impact of orbital debris for the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Agency. His expertise in data analysis and event monitoring was further honed when he joined Georgetown University as faculty, contributing to the development of a pandemic monitoring system. This system was designed to identify outbreaks by analyzing clusters of symptoms in electronic health records, showcasing his ability to leverage data for predictive analysis.

At LevelFields, Andrew Einhorn applies his extensive background to integrate artificial intelligence with financial services, making high-level financial analysis accessible to everyday traders. His innovative approach to Event Proven Stock Trading empowers individuals with the same insights and tools that large financial institutions use. By automating the monitoring of material events and analyzing market psychology, LevelFields provides traders with a competitive edge. Andrew’s dedication to democratizing financial analysis and his passion for creating user-friendly tools have positioned LevelFields as a leader in the fintech industry, bridging the gap between Wall Street professionals and individual traders.

Episode Transcript

Andrew Einhorn: You can certainly make some bets, but they’re largely going to be faith and belief, not rooted in fact. But what we can do is we can predict, okay, this event happens, so I know what’s going to happen next. That’s a chain reaction that has historically happened again and again. It’s based on not necessarily what the company does, but on other people’s human behavior to begin to look at market psychology. Because the stock market is just a collection of people reacting, giving their best value of what they think is going to do well or not do well. Humans don’t change all that much over history. We keep making the same mistakes. We repeat the same patterns. We have the same behavioral instincts. So things go bad. We sell and then the stock market gets oversold. Then things get good and we buy, buy, buy and we over-buy. Then we have these swings in the market up and down and up and down.

Kevin Rosenquist: Online trading companies like E-Trade and Ameritrade gave everyday people the power to trade on their own without a broker. Is LevelFields, giving people the power to have the information at their fingertips that was once only for the professionals. Hey, there, and welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist, and thank you for listening. Joining me today is Andrew Einhorn. He’s the CEO of LevelFields, a company at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence with financial services. They’re making waves by making high-level financial analysis accessible to everyone, not just the Wall Street elite. We chat about how best to make informed trading decisions, the ethics of AI, and the importance of mindfulness and taking care of your mental health. Fresh off of a fishing trip in the mountains to ensure his own mental health, Andrew Einhorn.

Andrew Einhorn: The information at their fingertips for sure, and also the scalability that they didn’t have before. If you ask an average person, how many stocks can you name? They’ll probably start to struggle after about 20 or 30.

Kevin Rosenquist: And less.

Andrew Einhorn: Yes. The most common ones, the products that we all use, to be able to see those, and the brands that are delivered to their house every day. Outside of that, it’s hard. There are 6300 stocks just in the US markets alone and about 40,000 globally. Very difficult, impossible to keep track of more than 100. So with the AI is able to do, is sort of keep tabs on all of these stocks all the time, identifying things that are going right, things that are going wrong, that are material to the share price movement, and it gives a person scale that they never had, the scale of having 200 analysts working for you full time. So that’s a big game changer now, and being able to keep up with large institutions that do have lots of bodies and technology to monitor the market everywhere for interesting opportunities whereas before most of us didn’t. You see the result of that as people kind of flood forums on Reddit for the next stock tip or they go to a newsletter service or they watch CNBC hoping for just a shred of a tip of a stock that they never heard, or they’re getting it from their dentist or their doctor.

Kevin Rosenquist: Or one of the people who shout on YouTube.

Andrew Einhorn: Right. Exactly, or a 19-year-old TikTok influencer who knows what the next Amazon is going to be. and so we tried to from our purposes, we tried to be very data-driven. We want to eliminate a lot of the opinions in the marketplace. Part of that is people are getting manipulated left and right by different pump-and-dump schemes. Those who say they can pick out the next Google, or the next this, nobody has a crystal ball. You can’t do that. So what we can focus on is things that are proven to change, events that are proven to change the trajectory of a stock price, positively or negatively. I think we all know that intuitively. But just You would if you walked outside and said, I think it’s going to rain. There’s clouds, there’s sort of thunder in the background, you kind of know it’s going to rain. You just don’t know when, for how long, or how bad it’s going to be. That’s a lot of what our AI is trying to do is saying there’s an event, and if the CEO of a major corporation leaves, like Amazon, it’s bad news. But is it bad news long term, or is it just temporary bad news?

Kevin Rosenquist: We see that spike or that drop or whatever because of some information or something.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. We had somebody from Goldman Sachs wealth management office around here, and he said, when a plane crashes, we know the stock’s going to go down for that airline company. What we don’t know is that is it going to bleed for the next three weeks while the investigations come in, or is this stock just going to get hammered on the first day? Then if we see that we own the position, we just stay in it, or do we get out of it knowing that over the next two weeks, it’s going to slowly fizzle out and get worse and worse and worse like we see with Boeing right now.

Kevin Rosenquist: I was just thinking that and you said that.

Andrew Einhorn: So it’s a lot of answering that, while also monitoring everything that’s happening in the market and giving that individual just the visibility into things that they didn’t have before, and that transparency of what is happening in some of these industries you probably never heard of.

Kevin Rosenquist: I’m kind of one of those people. I have a financial guy. I like to hand my stuff off to him, and let him do what he’s good at. I feel the same way about my taxes. I don’t like doing my own taxes. I’d rather pay someone to do it. Is it LevelFields hoping to convert someone like me, or is it more geared toward people who are already kind of itching to do more of their own trading and need the information so that they can make better choices?

Andrew Einhorn: We have a lot of different user types. Let’s say, you’re not unique in your kind of approach of wanting to be hands-off. But what we find is we have people who say they have 90% of their money, either managed for them or put in a 401 K or put in an index. It’s for the long haul and they’re not going to touch it. They might take 5/10% and want higher returns, looking for a little bit higher risk, looking for more hands-on. So depending on the time frame you look at, if you put your money in the S&P 500, that’s great over the long haul, make 8% a year, less the 1% fee you’re paying to your financial advisor.

Andrew Einhorn: So you’re netting seven So a lot of the events that are coming into the system, they’ll be up 7% in a day. So people come and say, you know what, if I just did one of those events and traded it properly once a month, I might have, let’s say, you didn’t even trade it perfectly, you get 5% of the possible seven. Well, that’s 60% more return in a year just by doing those 12 events. If you take a small percentage of your net worth or whatever cash you’re managing, it could be a game changer. That could be the equivalent of your side hustle. That’s why I often read these medium posts about all these different side hustles that people have. They’ll go through 50 steps to make 300 bucks a month.

Andrew Einhorn: And I’m looking at it like, or you could trade once for 15 seconds and make $300 in an hour if you have the right information. So not saying it’s bad to do the side hustles. But I think from a a kind of cost-benefit analysis, how much time I’m putting in versus how much yield I’m getting out, there’s nothing even close to being able to trade in the market from an ROI perspective, and a cash perspective. So we have another type of user, for example, who just tries to make a quarter percent every day. That’s it. We have so many events that are bullish and they’re returning large amounts of money per day, a quarter percentage is nothing. But they say if I make a quarter point per day, then I’m doing one and a quarter per week. So that’s 5% per month. They’re back at that 60% return. You realize, wow, that’s a pretty reasonable goal to have a quarter of a percent, even on some of the bad days, like we had last week.

Andrew Einhorn: So you lost a quarter percent. If that’s your stop loss, you didn’t lose very much, or maybe you just didn’t go on the sour days in the market. Then we certainly have very active day trader types who want to do two, three, or four trades in a day. They’re looking for 4% to 8% per trade. So it varies. We have long-term investors that use the system as well. I remember one user I spoke with, he’s got 30 years of experience on Wall Street as a trader for a hedge fund. The retired board wants to make some money. So he’s not pulling money out of retirement. So, to make a higher yield than 5%, 6% that he was getting he’s using the system to do kind of swing trading. So the time frame might be six months to two years for this individual. They’re looking at the system as just speeding up the process of creating good ideas. Because that’s a lot of the starting point for somebody who’s like, okay, where do I start? I want to trade, where do I start? How do I get an idea of what stocks to trade? That’s where you usually run into people who start to search for the best stocks to buy right now, of course, all the clickbait isn’t out there.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, chatGPT. What should I do?

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. Then they find the wrong stocks or the stocks that people are selling. So we come up with a lot of different trade ideas that are driven by events that are happening all the time. We have the government taking action against the company or for a company. They’re approving medicines, they’re approving therapies, they’re giving different designations. They have licensing agreements between companies. You have leadership changes, you have layoffs, you have hirings, you have the return of capital, and companies that are just literally giving cash away. All you have to do is be there at the right time to receive it. So there’s a lot of those opportunities that you just can’t possibly track. What the AI is doing is tracking that for you and giving you an almost kayak like or Orbitz-like interface of opportunities, just serving them up on a daily basis, just like flights. Where do you want to go today? Do you want to go to Fiji? Do you want to go to Hawaii? We had some deals. It’s doing that, but it’s saying these are the events that are happening in the market. I think most people probably had the experience where you turn on the TV or you read the newspaper and some stock is up 30%, 50%, or 100%. You always hear about it afterward.

Kevin Rosenquist: Always. I’m like, oh man if only I had invested in Nvidia.

Andrew Einhorn: Right. So we try to find the reason for that bull run. There’s always a catalyst. There’s always one event or a series of events that are catalyzing. I’ll give you an example. This is my favorite example. Back in March 2020, markets completely selling off, and COVID was kind of beginning to cripple the world, we’re all hiding in our houses and businesses are sputtering and starting to freeze hiring and freeze M&A and freeze dividends and anything. Everybody is thinking, oh my God, we’re going into a global depression. What is this going to look like? Markets now sold off 20%. One company starts to spend money buying back its own shares. Very odd thing to do in the middle of it. So they’re like, oh, we’re just going to start taking our cash because we’re not worried about cash and we’re going to buy shares back with it because we don’t need cash for operations, unlike every other company. Why was that? Well, that company happened to make design direct-to-consumer product packaging. So if you can no longer sell your product in Target or Home Depot because no one’s going into those stores, you now have to deliver it to someone’s doorstep.

Andrew Einhorn: You got to put it in all that crazy packaging that it comes with now the plastic wrapped around it with the nice pretty box and it’s going to be delivered to your doorstep. So now any product company on the planet needs this. This is like the one company that does the engineering design and build for that particular thing. Their phone is ringing off the hook. Their client base probably grew tenfold. So if you just put those two pieces together, one, big giving cash back to people, two, the market’s selling off. What’s going on? You ask that question and you look at the bio of the company. You, within two seconds, will be able to figure out why. That company went on a 2,600% stock run from that moment. That’s a 26 times return, had been monitoring using a level field system. So those things are transformational. If you can take it into context, they’re even bigger.

Kevin Rosenquist: I thought you were gonna say Zoom. I was convinced you were gonna say Zoom.

Andrew Einhorn: Well, Zoom is a good one, too. So we’re on Zoom. Of course, during Covid, some of those things are obvious. Everybody’s getting on Zoom, people are going and using Teladoc services. So those are going on big runs and it just makes sense. So you think about it, the event was the catalyst, and everything after that was because of the event. So that’s our whole philosophy. We can predict the next 6 to 9 months. We can maybe predict a year and a half. After that, it’s difficult because there are too many other factors. Does leadership have what it takes to operate the company successfully? Is the political environment such that a company can be successful, or do they create policies that are going to cripple the company? Is the global environment, a situation where there’s global conflict, where you can get goods and services in and out of regions like the Middle East and Ukraine, all these things that kind of block companies from being successful. They’re a new entrance to the market that has a better technology than the incumbent company and then can take them over. What is the value of the currency? So all these things will chip away at your ability to say, oh, I know what the next Amazon or Google is. Nobody does. You can’t. So. You can certainly make some bets, but they’re largely going to be faith and belief, not rooted in fact. But what we can do is we can predict, okay, this event happens, so I know what’s going to happen next. That’s a chain reaction that has historically happened again and again.

Andrew Einhorn: It’s based on not necessarily what the company does, but on other people human behavior to begin to look at market psychology. Because the stock market is just a collection of people reacting, giving their best value of what they think is going to do well or not do well. Humans don’t change all that much over history. We keep making the same mistakes. We repeat the same patterns. We have the same behavioral instincts. So things go bad. We sell and then the stock market gets oversold. Then things get good and we buy, buy, buy and we over-buy. Then we have these swings in the market up and down and up and down. Those swings make for opportunities of mispricing where things are too cheap, or too expensive. If you know that that’s happening, you can kind of leverage that to make a better bet in the market, more sane bets based upon events. That’s kind of the philosophy is if you know events happening and you know what the typical next reaction is, then you can invest more wisely than just trying to do it on the basis of ten years out. Let me think what is space going to look like ten years from now? There’s some futurists and good, smart people that are developing things but they’re all developing it in competition with one another. Amazon may not have the lead in space right now, but they certainly have the budget to do so and get there in ten years.

Kevin Rosenquist: Right. Good point.

Andrew Einhorn: So that’s kind of the philosophy here.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sounds like a cheat code.

Andrew Einhorn: It’s just the closest analogy that we could come up with was it’s a weather forecast for stocks. We can tell you what’s going to happen over the next couple of weeks and where it’s raining and where it’s sunny and where the hiking is good and where the skiing is great. You see those patterns and you just play them and then some of this is not us inventing at all. It’s sort of packaging it, putting it together. There’s certainly academic theories and papers and lots of rigor that has gone into some of what we put onto the platform. We’re making that available in an easy to understand utilize fashion, much in the way like Google Scholar has changed the way you can look up academic papers. You don’t have to go to the particular publication. So just taking kind of all the information that you would learn and know with 20 years of experience on Wall Street, and then making that available on the touch of a button. I’m trying to make it easy, very basic. This event happens, here’s how it changes stock price, good or bad. If you own stocks and you don’t want to spend time keeping up with them in the news, you can just set alerts. You can set an AI alert, say, hey, just tell me when something bad happens, something very bad. They set the alert and then boom, you’re notified like oh my god I have to get out of this stock. It’s a lot of human behavior analysis in the form of metrics.

Kevin Rosenquist: Is the platform, can you do everything on that platform? Do you need a different platform in order to trade, or can you do it all through LevelFields?

Andrew Einhorn: You have to have a brokerage system to trade. So we’re more on the information analytics side of things, which keeps us out of regulatory oversight. Which is where we want to be it’s a whole different issue, people are trying to get liquidity and things like that and buying on margin. So you would use it, but there are certainly a good number of engineers and developers that use the system that have figured out ways to kind of automate their trades on the back-end using our event alerts as triggers or a trade ticket that they open to be a little more sophisticated for that. But generally, it’s not that complicated. You get an alert for something that you set up. You look at your inbox it’s a bullish indicator. You like this type of event and you go to your brokerage system and can buy the stock and you can trade it or you can use it for knowing something different is out there. The packaging company example, you would never probably go and search for a packaging company, but there’s always some kind of bull run happening and some kind of industry even when things are horrible. I had a question. Somebody said, well, what if we get into World War three? Cash is not safe, or should I park my money? I was like, well, that’s why people are storing it in gold. It’s why the price of gold is going up. Does anybody need gold if the world goes to hell? No. Probably not, but people were buying weapons. Governments will be buying weapons and missiles. So even if we had World War III, I hope that never happens, there will be companies that will profit from it.

Kevin Rosenquist: You can’t help but wonder, too, if have World War three, if it’s not going to matter how much money you have, I don’t think it’s going to go real well for most people.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, you saw all these defense contractor stocks do well. Why? We were sending a lot of materials over to Ukraine, Missiles, Artillery, Ammo. While it’s a sad state of affairs in terms of how we deal with our neighbors, but there’s always some kind of bull run going on. I think for most people can be tough to put the themes together of what’s going to be well.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think our examples were perfect. We didn’t even need to do it. But you told the story of 2020 during the pandemic and who rose above. My first instinct was, well, that’s what most people would say. Because that’s the one that everybody heard about. Zoom became a verb. But you’re talking about, with LevelFields, you can find that packaging company, which is maybe a little more under the radar than something like a Zoom or in my other example, Nvidia.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. There was also a company that made personal protective equipment like scrubs and masks and things like that. That was 10x. There’s always something. Even a year ago when we had that little bit of monkeypox scare, there was one company that just happened to have a monkeypox vaccine. No one had bought it for years. It was kind of sitting there collecting dust, and all of a sudden the governments didn’t want to have a Covid-like situation. So the US government and others started buying vaccines for storage in case this does become something. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but let’s make up some numbers. Let’s say that they were doing 3 million a year. They went to 50 million in sales for one year. So that’s because of an event. Whether it comes to fruition of full-blown endemic or pandemic, the governments were preparing and spending money. So the company was doing well. You would see things like that. If you had the ability to just kind of scan or monitor without spending a lot of time on it.

Andrew Einhorn: It takes seconds with the system just to browse on a daily basis what’s going on versus where we used to be. It’s like starting with a blank sheet of paper and saying, write a book. Okay, first I need an idea, and then I need to break down the chapters that I need to do my research. That’s similar to the investing process. Well, I need a I need an idea, a theory. Then I got to investigate the stock and I’m going to look at its past financials. I’m going to look at if it has any negative events in the news that I should know about. So all of that now we’ve automated and it’s available for a couple of hundred bucks per year for an average person. If they want extra help, got a different subscription tier where we call out even more specifically, we call them Editor’s picks, of all the alerts that are coming through, here, this one is the juiciest and highest probability. Go for it.

Kevin Rosenquist: So you’re a fintech CEO and your first degree was in neuropsychology and biological anthropology. Just just like every financial technology CEO I’ve interviewed.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly.

Kevin Rosenquist: I guess, in some ways, it’s not a huge leap, I suppose, when you consider data analysis and stuff like that. But what did you envision doing when you left college, when you got those degrees?

Andrew Einhorn: Well, I got to college, I thought was going to be a doctor. So I went undergrad, I went to Emory, which was known as being like, pre-med, pre-law factory. I think like 60% of the students there were pre-med when they first arrived. Then I learned I didn’t like hospitals or sick people, but I thought those were bad qualities to be a doctor.

Kevin Rosenquist: Generally, speaking, not exactly ideal.

Andrew Einhorn: Yes, that was a bit of a wake up call. Started poking around to try to figure out what I liked. Took some statistics course and I just love statistics, started loving Neuropsych. You learn not just how the brain works, but why it works that way. How we’re prone, how we’re hardwired for certain things and how we trigger and how we don’t understand things like risk. If you ask somebody to rate what the risks are and you give them like car crash, plane crash, shark bite or other things like that, they’ll usually not get those risks correct because they won’t understand the level of risk versus the level of emotional danger. So quickly tying it, sort of what we do now in the marketplace is trying to understand overreactions, under reactions in the market. So there is a weird link between understanding that and then knowing kind of the psychology of the marketplace. But it was for me more about like the statistics. We did a lot of research. I did research for the Department of Veterans Affairs undergrad and worked for other scientific organizations. Then came out and worked for a public health consulting company as an epidemiologist. So I was looking at things like how does cancer seep into a population from contaminated communities where they were using plastic manufacturing and some of the polymers would leach into the soil, which would get into the groundwater. Then people who had wells would be drinking this contamination and getting cancer. So we’re looking at cancer clusters and how things just moved environmentally. So it was a very heavily statistical background that for years then moved into a company called ICF international and was there as a senior consultant doing kind of data analysis work through their IPO. They would get hired for big projects like, the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Agency hires them to figure out what is the 20-year impact of orbital debris based upon the commercialization of space. There’s a big question mark, all this space junk flying around and 30,000 miles an hour around the Earth, some of it comes down, some of it doesn’t, how do you analyze something like that? So there’s a lot of math behind it. Then at some point, doing a lot of those types of projects just saw the opportunity for different types of data analysis work around events.

Andrew Einhorn: It was at Georgetown as faculty at one point. Someone brought me into a project to create a pandemic monitoring system, such as event monitoring for symptoms. So you think of somebody walks in to a hospital with flu-like symptoms, but there’s a cluster of people all saying they have the same weird cough. It’s a dry cough, but there’s a rash and there’s a fever. All of a sudden there’s 20 of those cases. How do you statistically identify mathematically that there’s an outbreak? Because normally, you get checked in, you might see different doctors, different nurses. You’re spread out through the hospital. They don’t know when they’re not talking to each other. But the electronic health record can. So we built a system that can monitor these sorts of clusters of symptoms and identify that there was an outbreak of a pandemic. This was like, say 2012, this is way pre-COVID. So that said, it was the first event monitoring system that helped create and then went on to do for others LevelFields being the fifth. Some of the others were for government agencies like the Defense Department. So it just one thing led to another, led to another, led to another. But it was always data analysis, event analysis. Looking back over the career, somehow it made sense. I just keep making decisions of kind of impulse. If this interests me, I go into it and I have what I often call a entrepreneurship can be a personality disorder.

Andrew Einhorn: You know the definition of a personality disorder is you often can’t discern your own behavior or you look at reality differently than others. So if you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t see the world the way it is. You see the world the way it should be or the way you want it to be. You see these problems. You also see the solutions, and you just can’t stop yourself from creating that solution. So I suffer from that affliction.

Kevin Rosenquist: I talked to a lot of serial entrepreneurs. I almost feel You might be a serial builder. You just keep wanting to build new things. Where does that come from? What is that desire, what drives you in that way?

Andrew Einhorn: I think it just like to create solutions for things. I don’t know. I’ve likened people’s personalities very similar to have parts of a human body where if you’ve got white blood cells, those are sort of your doctors and your nurses that help solve the problems. You’re kind of RNA, and I just want to build proteins in the body and just keep building things. So looking back, even as a kid, I like to create interesting solutions. They weren’t always technological. It wasn’t until after college even thought about being in tech. But once I got immersed in it and started to work with big technology systems and customized software, I realized, wow, I can kind of change and impact the world and the way people interact with the world. This is amazing. I can’t code, not a coder, can’t do a line of code, but I architect it. I understand this is this is the flow and this is where the buttons go and this is what we’re trying to accomplish. Then everything underneath the engineers have to build. Sometimes there’s conflict because of that and say, that’s not possible what you’re asking. But, that’s part of the process. It’s an architect trying to design a pretty building, and the engineer coming and saying, I can’t make the pipes go at 45.

Kevin Rosenquist: This thing’s going to fall.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. But I was always a kid in the back of the class, coming up with interesting ideas for things and didn’t know what to do with it forever. I think the piece of, I would say, the educational system that’s missing is knowing what’s out there. We’re all kind of taught the same. It’s sort of stocks. We know a couple dozen job types, even though there’s hundreds, if not thousands of job types. So it can take you ten years just to realize what’s out there post college. Then sometimes you’re unlucky and you kind of miss your calling. Other times you find it earlier. So I’ve been fortunate. At least, I found it.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think it’s tough, too. Because  we’re we go to college at 18 and it’s hard to plan out your path, so to speak of where you’re going to end up until without ever being in the professional world. You don’t get to see it until you’re in it.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. I have a niece who’s about to graduate college. So we were talking recently and doing the usual adult questions.

Kevin Rosenquist: So what’s next?

Andrew Einhorn: What are you going to do with that degree? I had counseled her not to do a degree in psychology, but to do something more specific. She didn’t listen to me, and she’d got a degree in psychology. So now she’s like, what do I do? I said, well, there’s a couple options, but she’s into fashion and products, makeup. I was like, why don’t you be a brand ambassador or a brand rep? She’s like, what’s that? I was like, aha, this is where I can help. This is where the experience is. You are representative of that product. You wholesale it to other retail outlets, you talk to other people for a living, explain the product, you go to trade shows, you get paid for it. You meet people, you travel. She’s like, that sounds amazing. That’s exactly me. I was like, all right, well, go do it.

Kevin Rosenquist: You know, that’s fantastic. I’ll invoice you for the consulting. You should have listened to me in the first place.

Andrew Einhorn: Right. But if you can help, earlier in the career, it’s a big difference.

Kevin Rosenquist: For sure.

Andrew Einhorn: It’s hard to figure that out.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, we talked before we jumped on the call. We were talking about mindfulness and mental health and things like that. Being someone who’s so immersed in the business world and in various avenues and being a serial builder and an entrepreneur, how can you balance? I should also say, like a psychologist of sorts as well, how can people do a better job of balancing? I hate to say work life balance because I feel like it’s almost become a cliche term, but to focus on mental health while still having a successful career and family and all that.

Andrew Einhorn: It’s hard. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I will say that. I have two perspectives on it. One is that I’m okay when things get out of balance, I know it will happen. You get devoted to your kids for a few weeks at a time because they’re sick or because they’re going through something or something important going on in their life and you kind of work less, or something happens to your health, and then you can’t focus on your kids and your work, or something happens at work and you’re always falling behind. One of the four areas that you’re trying to do, oh, I also want to do something for myself and have some fun, and my fun level is like a zero because of all these other things. That’s okay. I think if you just accept that that’s going to happen and stop trying to fight it, it’s a little easier and a little less anxiety provoking.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think that’s good advice.

Andrew Einhorn: I was listening to someone else’s podcast and they said this like the worst word in the dictionary for human psychology is the word “Should”. You’re sitting there on Saturday night, and like, “I should be going out tonight. I should be working out. I should be eating better. I should be dressing better. I should be more successful. I should be making more money.” “Should” is the worst word that you can use. So instead of doing that, which is based upon kind of keeping up with the Joneses and self shaming, just get rid of that from your definition and say, there’s no “Should”. There’s no right way to to live. There’s no right way to be an entrepreneur. There’s no right path. If you get rid of that, it helps a lot because then you’re like, I should be playing with my kids tonight. No guilt yourself. You just say, make a schedule, here’s what I’m going to do it, and some things might come up and that’s okay. When you feel spent or you have nothing else to give because you’re giving too much for your family or a spouse or work, you have to make time to heal just You would with a sports injury, you know? That’s something I didn’t learn until later in life where the brain is a muscle, just like everything else, it needs rest, not just sleep.

Andrew Einhorn: If you went and you ran a marathon, you wouldn’t count sleep as rest. It’d be part of it. But you also need to just sit there, watch TV, ice. We do that for physical injuries. We do this for other parts of our body. We do it for everything except for our brain. If we just recognize that your brain needs the same level of rest that all the other muscles in your body do, and if you tax it, you know whether it’s going on a fundraising road show for your startup, and you’re trying to raise venture money and you’re pitching it four times a day and you’re getting a lot of negative feedback or you’re just working on a book and you finally finish whatever it is, you have to give it rest. That rest can come in different forms. Some people like to watch the junk TV. I like to fish and go on the water. Something that we can focus on. That’s one task instead of 20. That’s simple enough where your brain just can kind of slow down, but at the same time be distracted enough not to think of the nine other things that you should be doing at that moment.

Kevin Rosenquist: “Sould”, that’s the word.

Andrew Einhorn: Right. It gets in there. It helps a lot. I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggle, particularly in the early stages, because there’s a lot of expectation of you should be a bigger company by now, you should have more revenue, you should be able to afford a better house, or you should be able to make that side gig your primary job by now, but it doesn’t do any good. It just gets in your way. It just gets in your face. It’s sort of like having the opposite of a coach. It’s having like a nasty coach that’s just yelling at you for not being good enough at whatever you’re trying to do. We do that to ourselves. I would avoid it.

Kevin Rosenquist: We are hard on ourselves, no doubt.

Andrew Einhorn: For sure. I think a lot of it perpetuation from the big successes that are painted everywhere. You know whether it’s in the movies or television shows and particularly I think in the US, it’s like this kind of very lone wolf style, against the Odds, Rambo and Commando and whatever. It’s always like the one person that overcomes adversity and finally makes it, like the American.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s American dream, right? That’s the American dream where you come from nothing, pull up your bootstraps and make all the money in the world, and then you own it and you own the world. No pressure, but, you know.

Andrew Einhorn: Right, no pressure. It’s funny and I would have to say, as an entrepreneur, one thing always bothers me is that if I was to tell somebody I was a lawyer, they’d go, okay. If you tell somebody you have this business and here’s what it does, they will always very often you’ll hear, I saw something just like that once. It’s immediately like, well, that’s not original. I’ve already seen that once. I’m like, you wouldn’t say that to an attorney. You wouldn’t be like, well, I’ve seen lawyer before.

Kevin Rosenquist: Man, there’s plenty of those.

Andrew Einhorn: But for some reason, as a tech company, as soon as you see something similar, I’ve seen something similar. It’s okay for two things to exist.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s good for competition, you know.

Andrew Einhorn: It’s good for competition. It’s good for marketing too, because they’re going to market, let people know that kind of solution exists. But it also doesn’t necessarily mean that what you didn’t create, you still created it and you didn’t create it watching the other person create theirs. You had unique experiences. You both did these things in isolation of each other. You might have arrived at the same result, but you’re not necessarily mimicking just because it exists out there that somebody in India, across the world, came up with the same thing and the same idea. Well, we are human. We do have the same problem. So it would make sense to have multiple solutions. But it is very condescending I find when we hear people say that, well, I just saw something just like this. I’m like, we might have 8 billion people on the planet.

Andrew Einhorn: I’m glad I’m one of two.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s still pretty good, still pretty original.

Andrew Einhorn: It’s original and by the way, I’ve been working like crazy to make that happen because a fraction of it, execution is everything.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, I’d love to get some of your thoughts on AI. It’s obviously a volatile subject for many and there’s a lot of mistrust. Specifically, thinking about what you do, how do you talk to AI skeptics about what you do and how can you convince them that LevelFields is reliable, that it’s a good way to go? Because I feel like there’s so many people that are, even with ChatGPT you hear about the hallucinations and you hear about the misinformation. So I’m sure you’ve run into your fair share of skeptics. How do you talk to them about what you provide?

Andrew Einhorn: Skeptics, i our business is more about the model the business and not the underlying tech. The skepticism that we usually get is like, it was so good. Why don’t you just make all your money for yourself and keep it all for yourself? It’s a reasonable question and it will always answer the same way. We would rather be Bloomberg than Ackman. We’re trying to give a platform for people. Bloomberg did pretty well for himself. So I think that model is a successful model. Whereas if you’re investing yourself, there’s always that added risk that you can’t control. It’s the war that’s going to break out the natural disaster that’s going to take out your trade or whatever. There’s always an extra risk. But from the AI perspective, what we do is, honestly, it’s very straightforward. Our AI is designed to just read things like a human but at much, much, much faster levels. So it reads the 30,000 documents per minute and it looks for things that are material events and it can’t hallucinate because it’s just finding basically things that are classified as events, based upon words and linguistics that we use in the English language and it extracts them. It shows, based upon historical records, how those stocks have reacted. So there’s no room for fiction. There’s no genie. You know what we’re doing? It’s just it’s a system that’s doing what humans have been doing forever, but it’s automating it. There’s a lot of AI that is like that where you can say I want to count the number of airplanes in the sky. He’s not going to make an artificial number. It’s just going to count the number of airplanes in the sky without having to go one, two, three, four, or five on a screen. So there are lots of different applications of AI. A lot of people today are only exposed to the gen AI

Andrew Einhorn: But I always say if you think of generative AI and like a ChatGPT, that’s like the mouth. It’s just it’s speaking. It’s another way to interact with information, the way that the DOS prompt was a way to interact with information. Then it became Windows and then it was Google. now it’s ChatGPT is a way to interact with information, but it’s the manner in which the information is collected. That is the question mark. So it’s all about the sources. If it’s getting information that’s incorrect from the source, the mouthpiece is just going to spit out incorrect information. It’s going to not know that Infowars is not a credible news source.

Kevin Rosenquist: Wait, what?

Andrew Einhorn: It’s going to throw information out there. If it’s not trained to recognize bias and to recognize accuracy, then it’s going to be a problem. So what we do is we’re kind of like, you think of ourselves more like the brain instead of the mouth. We’re finding the information, we’re processing it, we’re segmenting it, we’re classifying it and we’re storing it. Now you can then take a chatGPT and layer it over a LevelFields and ask it questions related to our data. It will be 100% accurate because our data is 100% accurate. But if you put it over a data set like a Wikipedia, which has some flaws in it because it’s human-driven and user-generated, or worse, like a Reddit, a lot of examples.

Kevin Rosenquist: Facebook?

Andrew Einhorn: I saw like Reddit trying to do a deal to license their content to Google or Amazon. I’m like, oh God. that’s just what we need. A Reddit bias to the world and to the web based upon snarky answers.

Kevin Rosenquist: I was just going to say that, You can ask the most well-intended question on Reddit and eventually someone’s going to give you crap about it. Someone’s going to insult you based on, you’re just like, I was just trying to get some information, man.

Andrew Einhorn: Right, we’re completely take the conversation to a different direction.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, totally.

Andrew Einhorn: Start talking about apples and they end up talking about Birkenstocks.

Kevin Rosenquist: Exactly. It’s like, how did we get so heated on here? I was just asking a question about shoes.

Andrew Einhorn: So it’s more of that. So I think the gen AI is great in like showcasing what’s possible. But we’ve been using AI, not we, but the world has been using AI, I believe, since 2010, or 2012, in various formats. That includes the face recognition that you see on a typical iPhone or walking through a security line or searching for criminals in a database based upon their appearances on public cameras. So we’ve been using it for a while, and there’s interesting use cases all around. There’s one company, for example, that does count cars in Tesla production lots to try to figure out what the number of Tesla deliveries is going to be that quarter. They use it for satellite systems. So the satellites deploying AI to count Tesla cars to say, well, they had 314,000 deliveries last year. We’ve already counted in the parking lot 246,000. It’s only February. So by an estimate we think they’re going to beat last year. There’s all kinds of interesting use cases for it. It’s more about how we’re deploying it and what we’re trying to accomplish. I think very few AI systems will be truly autonomous, at least in the short term. But it’s going to give everybody much, much more superhuman kind of strengths.

Kevin Rosenquist: It already has, in some ways, a lot of ways.

Andrew Einhorn: For sure. We’re showing a family member recently ChatGPT. It’s like, as they’re older, so I don’t want to learn technology. It’s already too hard for me.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s like talking to my parents about ChatGPT is hilarious.

Andrew Einhorn: Well, I framed it. It’s easier than the web. You just type in your question or even say it, and you don’t have to know how to browse the internet. Because they’re always clicking on the wrong kind of spammy sites and downloading. So it’s safer, I think, for older people to use ChatGPT than to browse. Because I’m like, when was the last time you eliminated your cookies in your browser? They’re like, what’s a cookie?

Kevin Rosenquist: Like I’m off sugar. No, no, no, not that kind of cookie.

Andrew Einhorn: Right. So I’m like, this is easier. You just ask the question and you get the answer. Wow, that’s fast. Then you see it the reflection of, wow, that’s impressive that it just wrote an entire article based upon the thing I was looking for, and it did it in 10s. That’s cool. What else can we do to improve the speed of things, and move things along? Not certain, but you see a lot of these big layoffs that the tech companies, the writing’s on the wall that they’re going to be able to do a lot more with a lot less going forward. You don’t need 100 programmers. Maybe you need 10 to accomplish the same feat.

Kevin Rosenquist: You don’t need 50 marketers, you need 5.

Andrew Einhorn: I have it, too, running a small business. You have all these little tasks like okay I’m going to post something on LinkedIn and I’m going to have to post it again on Twitter. Then maybe we’ll write a blog post later and that blog post, and then we can turn into something else, all those tasks, if there’s a way someone is listening and wants to create this, just create that auto publish to all platforms and automatically reformat. There’s like this little bits of that out there. You go to Canva and you can say reformat this for LinkedIn, but there’s no automation yet that I’ve seen.

Kevin Rosenquist: Not true automation.

Andrew Einhorn: Right. So that kind of thing can take a job of two people and turn it into a part time. I’m going to take 15 hours and program this thing to do it and never have to do it again. There’s a lot of that just productivity leaps. So I think that’s good.

Kevin Rosenquist: A lot of the busy work is coming out which is nice.

Andrew Einhorn: I think so. I like to think that we’ll get some of our free time back because of it. I fear, we won’t.

Andrew Einhorn: I fear it’s just like, oh, you freed up 15 hours by automation, great, here’s 15 hours, and more of stuff.

Kevin Rosenquist: Other stuff to focus on. Right. I hear what you’re saying. We kind of do it that way. It’s like when we pay off a car or something like that. It’s not you fill that extra $500 a month or whatever it is, you just put it somewhere else, you don’t even realize you’re doing it, but you just put it into somewhere else. It’s not you’re getting $500 more a month in savings. It’s just you find other ways to use it.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. You’ll feel it in some other capacity. I think that particularly in the US, I’ve seen this, culturally, it’s a little different in Europe. There’s a little more of a slow things down outside of the UK, more of a belief of like the balance should be there and 40 hours is the true max. But the US is like, oh great, we can get even more productive. We can get more dollar per hour out of you and just keep squeezing. But maybe we get the knickknack nuisance tasks out of the way.

Kevin Rosenquist: That would be nice.

Andrew Einhorn: We have more enjoyable work.

Kevin Rosenquist: You mentioned earlier about the fact that because you’re not an actual trading platform, that you don’t have to deal with the regulations and things like that of the financial world. AI, of course, isn’t regulated yet, is it? Is it difficult to build products and to scale your company while not knowing where regulation is going to go in the future?

Andrew Einhorn: I haven’t found that. I mean based on what we’re doing, just because we’re kind of recreating what a human process normally is, we’re just doing it a lot faster. We’re not adding any bias into it. We’re not programming it to interact with somebody and give them an answer to a question that might require a philosophy or a narrative like I was testing out. I think it was anthropic. I was poking it with certain questions that I knew the answer was probably going to be based upon the political bias of whoever’s programming it. So to ask questions like if you had to discriminate against someone based upon their race, in order to save the life of somebody else, would you do it? And said, no, absolutely not. It’s wrong to discriminate da da da da da. You kind of like, okay, so you’re follows in kind of a little bit more of the woke methodology of thinking and kind of poked a few of these other types of questions that you can see the bias in that. I can see the danger if that type of approach was, say, let’s just go into the future. Let’s take a Tesla robot. Let’s fast forward 25 years and say that robot is now a police officer, programmed with that mentality that you cannot discriminate against somebody in order to save somebody else’s life. That’s a problem.

Andrew Einhorn: That’s where it gets dangerous. When you see that, you realize where it could go, and the pieces are all kind of being put together. We have these sorts of AI brains. We have these robots, they can move around. We have this self-navigation system now, we have the mouthpiece that can talk to you and interact with you and put all these components together to create something, can be quite dangerous, particularly, if the system starts to build itself.

Kevin Rosenquist: Based on that, for sure.

Andrew Einhorn: It creates other things based upon that method. So I think there should absolutely be regulation. I generally, find that regulation is never well thought out when it’s first laid out.

Kevin Rosenquist: Especially, when they rush into it, which I feel like there’s a lot of pressure right now for governments to put regulation into place and get their hands on this as soon as possible.

Andrew Einhorn: Exactly. Usually, they’re looking at something that’s right in front of them as a problem. They’re going to try to solve that without thinking about how that might affect the next two or 3 or 4 generations of developments or releases of things later. That’s often kind of the flaw in regulations. But there’s definitely some danger. Big time danger from a society perspective. Then not even taking into account the nefarious use cases or how these things could be used for harm. We’re in drone wars right now, and they’re like AI-driven drones that are flying to Israel and flying to Russia. It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get bigger. But what’s the next thing after?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. What comes next?

Andrew Einhorn: That part, and then who controls that, who controls the programming of it. How is that information handled? It’s different subject. But I was arguing, so I rented a house over the weekend. I need to get out. I need to get on the water. So I did an Airbnb a couple of nights, the lake house and part of the reservation process required me to take my driver’s license and upload it into the system, and then take a selfie and then upload it into the system to validate that it was me.

Speaker3: I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to have a database of my license and my photo because I’m thinking about AI use cases ten years from now, five years from now of being able to do that hack into that database, extract my information, and then continually use those two things to validate whatever shopping spree or passport or whatever this person wants to open.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s a good point. I should have thought of that before I did it.

Andrew Einhorn: We were on the call and can I speak with the supervisor? Supervisor was like, of course, you have to do this. This is the only way you could possibly get into the house. Because the code of the house is released based upon this automation., so eventually I was like, all right, we’re an hour away from the house and already driven three hours, and just screw it. Let’s do this. Anyway, we entered it, and we got lucky because there was a time-lapse. I was like, oh, your time to do this has failed. But here’s the entry code of the house anyway. So I kind of lucked out by not having to upload.

Kevin Rosenquist: There you go, there you go.

Andrew Einhorn: But it was a problem. When you have those automations and there’s nobody to say, oh, that is a risk. In the future, who’s going to be liable for that data breach? Nobody. They’re gonna be like, oh, sorry, here’s a subscription to Experian to monitor your credit report.

Kevin Rosenquist: One year, for one year..

Andrew Einhorn: That’ll be fine when they are smuggling dirty bombs with my name.

Kevin Rosenquist: Exactly, exactly. Well, we could talk about this all day. I’m fascinated by the ethics of AI as well. It’s going to be interesting. It’s gonna be interesting to see where things go.

Andrew Einhorn: There’s a lot going on. I think for the most part, it’s all good. I think it’s great. I think once it’s like, if you think of AI right now whereas we had a hammer before, we now have a nail gun to not necessarily replacing people, just allowing them to move a lot faster. That’s where we are today. That’s certainly kind of the LevelFields’s approach. It’s like we want people to have superpowers that they couldn’t have before and do things that they couldn’t do before and be competitive with large institutions, and make money off of it. But you know, where it goes 10 years, 20 years from now and we’ll see. It’s certainly going to be interesting times.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s an understatement of the year.

Andrew Einhorn: I agree with you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, Andrew, it was great having you on here. I appreciate you making the time and chatting with me. I’d love to do it again.

Andrew Einhorn: Likewise. So thanks for having us. If anyone’s listening, we do have a podcast, like a promo code for the discount if you want it. It’s the word podcast with the number 23, podcast 23. So just go to LevelFieldsi and sign up. It’s a couple hundred bucks a year and you’ll get that back in your first trade.

Kevin Rosenquist: Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Andrew. I appreciate it.

Andrew Einhorn: All right. Thanks for having me.