Your dollars are lazy. That’s the bold claim that stopped me cold this week. Most of us treat money like something to guard, and the whole time it just sits there doing nothing.
I came across a video from Dan Martell, an angel investor who’s been voted number one in Canada and has backed dozens of companies alongside founders from Google and even Jay-Z. He lays out the exact way he now uses AI to find deals, stress-test them, and watch over everything he owns. I was genuinely hooked because it’s not the “ask ChatGPT for stock tips” nonsense you’d expect. It’s a real system, and the mindset shift underneath it is the part that got me.
The big idea: stop preserving, start creating
The creator’s core belief is simple. Wealth preservation is building a wall around your money, and that wall blocks new money from coming in. He describes dollars as “little soldiers” that should be out on the battlefield working for you. The goal is getting to the point where your money works hard enough that you don’t have to.
And here’s where AI enters. He doesn’t use it to chase the obvious plays like “buy Google.” He uses it to spot the second and third-degree opportunities nobody’s talking about yet. That’s the whole edge. I think this reframing matters because it changes what you even ask the AI to do.
Three moves from the playbook
🔍 Find the deals other people miss
The original poster’s method is to hunt for winners hiding one or two steps behind the headline trend. His example is sharp: ask AI about the AI industry and it won’t just say Nvidia. It’ll point you toward the energy demand and the electricians who have to install all that new power infrastructure. Those are the plays with room left in them.
He shares two prompts for this. First: “I want to invest in [industry/trend]. Map out the second and third-degree winners and losers. Who are the suppliers, the adjacent industries, and the companies that get disrupted? Give me 10 names I wouldn’t think of.” Then follow up: “Now run an analysis of recent trends and market signals around those names and show me the real opportunities.” He even runs a version where he has AI pull the top seven research papers on where the world is heading, finds the common threads, and matches them against what he’s already building. That’s how he picks companies.
🛡️ Red team it before you fund it
This is my favorite part. Before putting a single dollar in, the expert has AI try to destroy the idea. Red teaming means you deliberately attack your own thesis. His logic: if you know everything that can go wrong, you can plan around it and lower your odds of losing money. Most people skip this step, and that’s exactly how good-looking deals turn into losses.
His prompt is blunt: “I’m about to invest in [company/asset]. Let’s play out the worst-case scenario and give me the 10 reasons why this would lose me all my money. Be brutal. Don’t be nice.” Then you go down that list and ask yourself if you have a confident answer for each one. If you can’t, you pass.
He tells a story about a personal finance AI tool he almost backed. The AI flagged that the big AI companies would likely launch something in that exact space and crush him. He says that catch may have saved him millions. His pro tip: run the same prompt through two or three different models, because each one catches things the others miss.
📊 Let AI monitor everything
Once a deal passes, the creator has AI build a live dashboard for it. Real estate, vehicles, stocks, company valuations, all in one place with red, yellow, and green signals, little sparklines, and alerts when something moves more than 10 percent. He quotes Peter Drucker: what gets measured gets managed.
To set it up, list every asset you own, then prompt: “Build me a live dashboard that tracks [your list]. For each one show me what healthy, caution, and unhealthy looks like based on price movement, market trends, and key signals. Flag anything I should look at.” He also says to tell it your actual goals so it can guide you, then pick one day a week to review. If you’re on Claude, he suggests asking it to build an interactive artifact right in the chat so it’s easy to see.
The one rule that protects all of it
Here’s the warning the creator saves for last: stick with what you know. AI can do a lot, but it can’t replace your unfair information advantage. He tells a painful story about buying a bunch of $8,000 homes in Detroit 15 years ago, only to find them full of problems and basically worthless. His lesson was that he invested in something he didn’t truly understand.
So he runs every idea through three filters:
- Do I actually know this space and have an edge?
- Will I pay attention to it? He’d rather do fewer, bigger deals than a pile of tiny ones he’ll forget.
- Will it still be true in 10 years? He wants bets aligned with where the world is going.
His line stuck with me: the next decade won’t reward the best stock pickers, it’ll reward the system builders who collaborate with AI to track, test, and stay focused on their money.
The full video has more stories and detail behind each step, so give it a watch if this sparked something. Then ask yourself which of the three moves you’d set up first.