The Pretty Shiny Things | AI for People Who Have Other Things to Do
Pretty Shiny Things explains AI to ADHD millennials who built a career and a life before it existed, and now feel behind. Each week, Kat shares practical AI tools and tips for clearing the lists, calendars, bills, and side-hustle admin off your plate, so you have more time and mental space for what actually matters: being present, being creative, and building the thing you're trying to build. No hype, no jargon, just AI that works for a scattered brain.
The Pretty Shiny Things | AI for People Who Have Other Things to Do
03 AI Just Broke the Wealth Gap & Which AI App to Start With
•katmurphy •Episode 3
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For most of history, there’s been exactly one rule about getting ahead: pay in time, or pay in money. For the first time ever, both of those trades are available to basically anyone for about $20 a month—this episode breaks down the AI wealth gap and gives you the dead-simple way to actually pick an AI tool and stick with it. You’re in the right place.
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Kat Murphy
For most of history, there's been exactly one rule about getting ahead. Either you had the time to do the thing yourself, or you had the money to pay someone else to do it for you. And that's been the entire game since the first guy with two cows looked at the guy without any cows and said, "Actually, I'll give you some milk if you shovel the you-know-what out of my barn." Until now. For the first time, we're breaking that rule, and for less than the cost of a few cups of coffee. This is the Pretty Shiny Things podcast, a podcast for ADHD millennials who went through school, got ahead in a career, and built a whole life using nothing but dial-up AOL and a Trapper Keeper. And now it feels like everyone else picked up a new language overnight while you missed the memo. I'm Cat, and each week we'll talk about my favorite pretty shiny things, the actual useful ways to use AI to take some of the 400 lists, calendars, bills, and side hustle admin out of your brain and off your plate. Not so you can do more, but so you have more time to be present with your family, be creative, or finally build the thing you've only had time to dream about. If you're ready to stop feeling behind and start using AI in a way that actually works for your brain, you're in the right place Let's talk about the AI wealth gap because I don't think most people even understand the magnitude of what's actually happening here. No, this is not a productivity hack or an AI prompt. This is one of the oldest rules in human history starting to break in real time. For all of time, there's been exactly one rule: if you don't have money, you pay in time instead. A-and if you do have money, you get to buy your time back. Rich people trade money for time. Everyone else trades time for money. That's the game underneath every stock market headline and rags to riches story you've ever heard. And for the first time in the history of human society, AI is about to blow that up. So here's how this actually plays out. If you're working or middle class, you trade your time for money. You work the hours, you get the paycheck on a loop, and it's hard to find the time needed to invent the thing or pursue the dream or take the risk that might land you a big payday. This is the barrier to entry for anyone who doesn't have a lot of discretionary funds. On the flip side, if you're wealthy, you get to do the opposite. You trade your money to get your time back. You hire the assistant, you hire the housekeeper, you hire the person who handles the thing you don't personally have to do or want to do. And it's not only about time either. Think about literally anything extraordinary that's ever been built: a company, a big project, a skyscraper, something that used to require an entirely specialized team to pull it off. The barrier there was never really a better idea or more raw talent. It was money. Money to go hire people who actually knew how to do the thing you couldn't do yourself. So the real price of admission to doing something big, it's not vision, not creativity, and not talent. It's payroll. That's the second trade hiding right underneath the first one. Money for time, money for expertise. Same idea, two different price tags. So here's the part that actually matters for this episode, and it's the reason I wanted to talk about this in the first place. For the first time, and I mean first time in actual recorded history, both of those trades, money for time and money for expertise, are now available to basically anyone for about 20 bucks a month. I want you to actually sit with that for a second because I don't think it fully lands the first time you hear it. The tools that used to be locked behind, "I need a specialist for this," or, "I need to pay someone else to take this off my plate," are now sitting on your phone for less than a single Target's run worth of pretty shiny things. I'll give you the version of this that made it click for me. Think about anything you ever thought, "I would need to hire someone for that." A logo, a contract, a financial plan, someone to help plan an entire week when your brain is too fried to do it yourself. How about someone to just help you think out loud when you're stuck? Every single one of those used to have a price tag with at least two zeros on it minimum. Now it has a price tag of basically nothing, and it's all sitting in an app you already open 20 times a day anyway. For the first time, you can get some of the benefits of having an assistant without having to have the money to employ one. And if you're the kind of brain that listens to this podcast, which is to say an ADHD brain that already has 40 ideas and 12 tabs open at any given moment, that barrier being low should feel genuinely like good news, not like one more thing to feel behind on. Now, I wanna pause here again because I don't want this to come across as some hypey AI just fixed inequality claim, 'cause it's very much not that, and I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that that happened. There's still a real digital divide: Access to a device, access to reliable internet, and access to the 10 uninterrupted minutes it takes to even figure out if you can do this in the first place. Those are real problems, and one podcast episode is not going to solve them, and I'm not gonna insult anyone by pretending that I possibly could. What I'm saying is this: If you already have a phone in your hand right now, and you've got 20 bucks somewhere in your monthly budget, then the thing that used to require money that you didn't have, a team, an assistant, a specialist, is now something you actually have today in your pocket, and that's not nothing. That's kind of a huge deal. Yet most people are walking around with it and treating it like a glorified calculator, which is exactly why this is worth a full episode instead of a quick Instagram caption. Because the gap isn't closed. It's actively closing right now for anyone willing to spend a little money and a little time figuring it out. And by the way, this isn't some slow, gradual, someday in the future thing either. These tools have genuinely changed a wild amount in just the last several months. What looked like a fun party trick a year ago is doing real, actually useful, actually reliable work today. So if you tried one of these tools six months ago and thought, "Eh, that was underwhelming," and quietly wrote off the whole category, I need you to give it one more shot because it is a meaningfully different tool now than it was then. So let's start there. Because closing your piece of the wealth gap starts with one decision, and we're gonna make it together right now. Which tool do you open and actually stick with? This is the part that stops most people before they even start. You go looking, and it's total chaos. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and about 15 more you've heard of, and dozens more that you haven't even heard of, and every single one of them is telling you it's the best one. And nobody hands you a manual. So a lot of people just don't open any of them or try to open all of them, and analysis paralysis wins again. The $20 stays sitting in the bank doing nothing. So let me save you the spiral because I promise it doesn't have to be that complicated. Here's the simple version. For low stakes stuff like you want a recipe, you've got a random question, or you want to settle an argument about some random fact, whatever free tool you've already got on your phone is completely fine, including Google. You don't need to pay a subscription fee to fact check something at ten o'clock at night. But for anything higher stakes or anything you're going to lean on regularly, that's where you want to pick one paid tool and actually commit to it instead of bouncing between six different apps every week to try to find the mythical best one. And here's what no one's saying. At an entry level, it's not about finding the right tool, because at this point, they're all genuinely good. It's about picking one and actually sticking with it. Because the longer you use it, the more it starts learning how you talk and what you're working on, and what your life actually looks like. Bouncing around to a new app every single week resets that relationship back to zero every time. You're basically re-meeting a stranger on a loop instead of building an actual relationship with the thing. And if you've got an ADHD brain, I wanna gently point out that this exact pattern probably sounds familiar. Falling for the shiny new app instead of sticking with the one you already know works it's the same instinct that fills your phone with half-used habit trackers. I know I have tons of them. So it's worth noticing here too. If you want a starting point, and this is really just a rule of thumb, not some strict law carved into a tablet somewhere, just think of it like this. If what you're looking for is more of a chatty back and forth, bounce ideas around out loud brainstorming kind of thing, ChatGPT tends to feel a little more like that kind of conversation. If what you need is something that can really sit with a big, complicated in-depth task, like a long document or a messy project, something where you need it to dig in and mess with files on your computers or follow a very specific set of instructions, that's where Claude tends to shine. And both of them work great straight from your phone, so there's no more, "I'm not at my computer right now," excuses. And here's something that makes this a little less complicated. Even the companies building these things are cleaning up their own confusion. Claude used to make you choose between a regular chat mode and a separate get real work done mode before you even started typing. Those are folding into a single interface now, so no more picking a door before you even know what's behind it. And ChatGPT is doing their version of the same thing. The whole industry finally figured out that they were asking someone to pick the exact right setting before they've even typed a single word, and that's a dumb way to start anything. So now you don't even have to stress about finding the perfect mode inside the AI chat either. Just open it, start typing, and let it sort itself out from there. And here's the thing that's more important than which one is technically better. What are you actually going to use this thing for? Is it gonna be sitting next to you while you're working at a desk? Is it gonna be the thing that you talk to in the car, or while you're making dinner, or lying awake at night 'cause your brain won't stop circling? And no, that last one should actually not be an option. Don't do that, and go back to episode two if you need a reminder about protecting your nervous system, because a midnight AI spiral is exactly what that episode was warning you about. So pick based on how you'll really use it day to day, not on whichever app has a shinier logo or whoever's talking the loudest online this week. You don't need the right tool or the right mode inside it. You need a tool that you'll actually open a second time. Pick one, commit to it for a month, and let it start learning you. And if the one you pick ends up going off the rails in a few weeks or the other one comes out with some new shiny thing that you just have to switch over to, it's no big deal. You can export everything and drop it right into the other one, and we'll cover that later. You're not committing for life, just for now. Okay, so tool chosen. Now I wanna talk about where this is headed and why that's good news for us specifically These tools aren't just getting smarter at answering questions anymore. They're starting to actually work more independently, We're talking things like longer sessions where you're not stuck approving every single little step along the way, work that keeps going in the background while you're off literally doing anything else, and being able to start something on your laptop, close it, and check on it later from your phone instead of sitting there the whole time babysitting it. Even design and document work is starting to happen right inside the same conversation instead of you copy and pasting between five different apps like it's still 2019. Basically, these things are moving from something you sit in front of and type at towards something you can actually hand a task to and walk away from. And if you have an ADHD brain, I want you to sit with that for a second because that shift is genuinely built for us. Think about how much of the mental load of any task isn't even the task itself. It's holding the whole thing in your head the entire time it's happening, not letting your brain wander because you have to babysit it from start to finish. The idea that you could start something, actually walk away, go do the thing that your brain wants to do instead, and just check back in later, that's not a small feature update. That is the whole executive function problem shrinking. Now, I'm not gonna pretend I can teach you exactly how to make the most of that in the next two minutes because that's its own whole conversation, and it deserves more than a rushed tack on at the end of this episode. So here's the deal. Next episode, we're getting into exactly how to talk to these tools so you get real, specific, useful answers instead of generic ones. Plus how to set one up so you're not re-explaining your whole life and business to it every time you open it. For today, I just want you to know this: the tiny bit of the wealth gap that you just closed by picking a tool this week isn't a one-time thing you'll learn and you're done with. These tools keep getting more capable, which means the gap gets easier and easier to close, not harder. You're not locking yourself into learning one static skill forever. You're getting in while it's actively getting easier. Okay, let's gather up all the pretty shiny things I just threw at you and put them in one neat pile. The AI wealth gap is real, but it's not about being smarter or luckier than anyone else. It's the same time for money, money for time trade that existed forever, now available for twenty dollars a month. Pick one tool, subscribe to a paid plan, and actually commit to it instead of app hopping or overthinking which mode to use. These tools are moving toward doing more without you babysitting every step, which is genuinely good news for a brain that doesn't wanna hold a whole task in its head the entire time. And next episode, exactly how to talk to these things so you get real specific answers back and how to set one up so it actually knows you. Okay, so that's the recap. Let's bring it home. Here's the thing I really wanna leave you with. You probably already knew somewhere in the back of your mind that this was worth doing. That's usually not the hard part. The hard part is that knowing something could genuinely change your life and then actually doing the thing are two completely different muscles, and most of us are a lot better at the first one than we are the second. So here's your homework for this week, and it's small on purpose Pony up your $20, pick your 10 minutes, and open the thing. That's it. That's the entire ask. Get the app, open it up, say hello. And in the next episode, we'll pick up right where this leaves off Thanks so much for hanging out with me on this week's The Pretty Shiny Things podcast. If your brain just relaxed a little, you're gonna love my newsletter, The Shiny List. Three useful AI tips and tricks, two things I'm loving this week, and one AI prompt ready for you to use, all straight to your inbox each week. And yes, I know you already have enough lists. This is the one you'll actually want. You can sign up at theprettyshinythings.com, where you'll also find the show notes and links to any tools or resources I mentioned in this episode. And I really wanna hear from you. If there's anything about AI you want me to explain, something in your life you wish was easier, or something you're wondering if AI could help with, tell me. Message me on Instagram at Hey Kat Murphy or email me at kat@theprettyshinythings.com. And if you know someone who's trying to figure it all out too, send them this episode. We'll get caught up together. I'll see you next week. Until then, go be present, be creative, embrace the pretty shiny things, and let the robots handle the rest.
