The Wealth of AI: Matt Burton on AI's Impact on Finance, Society, and the Future

Josh St. Laurent: Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast, a show dedicated to helping you master the complex subject of money by simplifying it through stories and actionable advice. I'm Josh St. Laurent and this is Wealth in Yourself. Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I'm your host, Josh St. Laurent. Today we're joined by Matt Burton. Matt and I first met as financial advisors in Silicon Valley helping the wealthy manager finances. Since then, Matt has pursued his passion in the field of AI. He is now an AI consultant, writer and creator at his company, Savant AI. He's also a colleague of mine again as an adjunct professor at Golden Gate University. Today we're going to dive into AI in some of the ways Matt helps leaders utilize emerging technology to enhance what they're already doing as well as a strategy behind using AI. Josh St. Laurent: Matt, welcome to the show. So glad you're here and looking forward to this. Matt Burton: Me too, Josh. It's great to be with you. Thank you for the invitation. Thanks for the introduction. I'm really excited to speak with you. Josh St. Laurent: Absolutely. This is a hot topic. It has been for a while. It's constantly changing and really exciting to see all the different things that are being done with AI from the incredible things to the scary human-like robots. So tell us about Savant AI, like how it came to be and what the world should know about what you do. Matt Burton: It's a great question. My answer may be a little bit unexpected because it's kind of a left-brain, right-brain answer. So to go back to your intro, you and I met each other at Fidelity Investments. One of the leading investment firms in the world. I think we were both proud to work there, but you and I both know it was very regimented. Matt Burton: It had a playbook and there are times where as an entrepreneur or as a creator and individual, it really wants to connect with people and bring your own message. You want some of that freedom to tell your story your own way. You even want to hear your client's story and respond to each individual in the way that's best for the individual, not best for the firms, playbook or product line. So if you go to the meaning of Savant AI, it started with a screenplay idea that I had when I worked at Fidelity in Colorado. So I'd work my day jobs at Fidelity, helping people with their portfolios. Then I'd drive home and I'd start to kind of think about things. I had a 45-minute-to-an-hour drive depending upon the commute. My son was in high school. My son was very interested in technology, learned everything he learned on YouTube. Matt Burton: Sounds like a meandering story, but what I'm getting to, it's a very real story. Savant AI started for me somewhere real. I had a day job where I was asked to give clients the playbook answer, help them understand their portfolios, explain why we held international stocks, why we did a little bit of alternative investments, even when they weren't handing out well. I was supposed to do that call, have a real connection with the client, but do many of those calls in a single day according to a certain metric, a metronome and do them appropriately and they were recorded and they were reviewed. I thought, I've got to do the job well. Once the meetings are done, you need to record all of your answers in a system. There were times where I felt like a human and times where I felt like I was being asked to be a robot. Matt Burton: My Savant AI story starts with all of that and commuting home and thinking about my son and watching him unboxing things on YouTube. Here's the new thing I got, the new game. Let me show all my friends on YouTube and I saw all the creativity in his world of gaming and online media and I thought, what if somebody could get instead of a new iPhone, what do they think you could get a robot? My first notes on my bookshelf over here about Savant AI go back to about 2015 or 2016. So several years. For me, it all started a science fiction. What if I were a robot? What if instead of me at Fidelity, I could be augmented or have AI of some kind helping me when I got the chance to leave Denver, Colorado and go to Silicon Valley. It appealed to me because it was a way out of my current day job in a cubicle and getting into the front lines where I could meet with technologists who are really inventing the future. Matt Burton: Now for me, my interest in tech goes all the way back to my early days after college in New York City where I helped build websites. I worked at the cutting edge and I watched the tech cycle go boom and then in 2000 go bust. And the company I was in was about IPO. We were a startup company. We all believe we were building well in ourselves with the CEO and the executives, but suddenly the economy went against all of us. The runway for takeoff disappeared. We all lost our jobs except for the top five people and the interns and I had a three-year-old son. So my interesting tech goes way back. I pivoted. I did MBA and finance. I later pivoted and it went into financial services with a finance degree. I later moved on to Silicon Valley. I met with machine learning experts and all these people and I saw that what had been science fiction was becoming reality. Matt Burton: And then if you fast forward again, I knew a couple of years ago I wanted to leave financial services. I didn't have a lot of freedom there to do what I wanted or to accelerate my own wealth building, have control of my future. So I made an exit after taking some courses at Stanford. I took how to build a neural network. I took AI marketing. I took AI ethics and the list goes on. I took seven courses in one term. And then last January, January of 2023, I resigned my position and gave my full attention to AI, started getting to no clients. And Savant AI came from this idea that if we build AI correctly, we're going to build AI that helps us, that does things that are wise, that helps us know things. So we can know more and be augmented. That's where Savant AI comes from. Matt Burton: Now, for me, left-brain, right-brain means that I want to do things in business so I consult and I want to do creative things. So I'm a creator. And as I learn and teach, I also share what I learn as a writer. So it's not entirely focused because my focus includes learning, teaching, and consulting and building. So that's me, that's Savant AI. Josh St. Laurent: So much Joampak there, so much goodness. I can't help but wonder from you. You have such a unique background. What have you learned since leaving Fidelity? Because I know my own personal experience was extremely eye-opening, especially in the realm of AI, to see all the things being done out there that I just didn't have visibility too. And even since then, in the last two years, let's say, you know, AI has 10xed itself. So what have been the big eye-opening moments for you since launching? Matt Burton: Well, I'll tell you two things. I'll keep it more focused than my first answer. You and I were fortunate at Fidelity to use Salesforce. The program helped us stay on top of our customer relationships, our opportunities, the notes about what we discussed with them. And when you look at all of the data that we recorded, that's big data. It's valuable data, and it gave us insights into actions that we could take. So you and I both got that exposure, but you're right, we weren't seeing everything. If we had a great conversation with a client, we might have learned about the things they could publicly tell us about what they were doing at Netflix. Maybe. Maybe what they were doing at Nvidia, but frankly, I never learned anything from any Nvidia client about what they were doing because it was pretty locked down. Yeah, Nvidia or AMD, but Netflix, I least got insights that they got paid a lot if they were a machine learning. Matt Burton: So what I'm struggling with now to say what we learned from clients, we didn't learn a lot because frankly, artificial intelligence until about a year and a half ago was all behind closed doors. How Siri works was behind closed doors, we just used Siri on our phone. What they were actually doing with our data at Netflix, we didn't really know. This came up in the Hollywood actors and writers' strikes. The actors and writers said, my program is making a lot of money on Netflix, but I'm not getting residuals. Show me the data. And Netflix said, we won't show you the data. They didn't want people to know the exact numbers. So that idea of closed doors has been true with artificial intelligence. So what I've seen since leaving fidelity was was really driven most of all by open AI and chat GPT becoming public in November of 2022. Matt Burton: So just just year, year and a half ago, open AI brought forward what's called a generative AI tool. So it's not just data analytics and machine learning in the background that figures out our preferences and how to sell us things on Amazon or how to sell us the right or promote the right shows on Netflix. It was an AI that was available to us that we could manipulate and use and we could see the results. I want to say that a lot of people like you and me have something like Salesforce or something like predictive texting in their phone or something that they used in PowerPoint or Excel. But what really changed in the past year and a half is open AI brought forward what Google had actually invented. So Google made up generative AI back in 2017. They figured out something called Transformers. They figured out large language models. Matt Burton: But when open AI let people type into a screen, simple queries. Here's my question. Tell me this or write my essay or write me a poem or I want to make a children's book or I want to write a book about real estate and opportunities for people. It could generate whole books. It could generate whole essays. And that changed the world. And if you pair that with a tool like mid-journey, now you can make pictures to go in the book too. Mid-journey or dolly or these other things you may have heard of. Josh St. Laurent: Fascinating to me. Just how deep it goes and how quickly it's iterating and changing. I wouldn't say I'm on the cutting edge by any means of AI, but I do love to use, I'll say play around with the GPT-4 and some of the new GPTs that are coming out. It seems like on a daily basis. Josh St. Laurent: How does someone keep up with the changing landscape or do they not? And what are some of the tools that maybe someone who's a beginner in AI should be focusing on? Matt Burton: When we talked a few days ago, I told you I was designing a course. Because to answer your question, which I think is the question, what's a guy or girl got to know? What do you need to know now to not be in the dark or to not be behind or to not be at risk in your company? Or to not make a mistake when you go play with AI. There are attorneys that have used AI because it can generate things, it can write something, it builds something really quickly, but it actually is inventing stuff. It will invent cases, law cases. Michael Cohen did this recently in New York City. His attorney wrote a brief and it invented some of the cases that never existed. Matt Burton: Now he's in trouble because they presented things that aren't true to the court. He's not the first attorney to do that. There are things that people should know. That's one. AI is easy to use. It's fun to use. But the AI, most of what's are talking about, that generates new stuff, generative AI. It also makes things up. One technical term they have for that is hallucination. It hallucinates. You actually want it to hallucinate. You want it to be creative because that's its strength. It's modeled on a human mind. They build computer models. You ask the computer model a question and it says, maybe this is a great answer for you and it gives you what it thinks. If you say, I don't like that one, give me another one, give me another three, four, five, it will generate multiples and then you start curating the best answers. Matt Burton: You should know that it's fun. It's easy to do. It can make mistakes, but those mistakes are part of its charm and you need to curate. You need to edit. The human needs to stay in the process. The human needs to stay in the loop. The last thing I'd say is when you're talking about numbers, the models I'm describing to you so far, they're actually called language models and they're called image models. With the image models, they say they're diffusion models. The thing they do is they start with a blurry image and then they make it sharper and they say, do you like it? You need to curate. With the language, they give you a response. They say, do you like it? Should it make it longer? Should it be more like a tweet? Should it be a LinkedIn post? Should it be an essay? Matt Burton: And we as the human have to give it feedback. With numbers, you do not want creativity. You want two plus two to equal four still. And right now, these language models and image models can't do math. So this is an interesting thing. So people need to know the models can do some things and they can't do other things. The thing we need to do most of all is be curious. The class I'm designing to teach people on Maven, which is a learning platform, maven.com. It really starts with this be curious phrase that some of us heard in Ted Lasso. Did you ever watch that show? Do you know the scene where he's talking to Rupert and they're betting that if Ted wins a game of Dart against Rupert, they can keep the team. And he says, Rupert, you really should have been curious because if you had, you would have asked me, you know, he throws a dart hits where it should. Matt Burton: Ted, have you ever played darts before? And I would have told you, funk. You know, yeah, every Sunday at three o'clock every year until my father died when I was 16, something like this. And he wins the game and he wins the team. But it all starts with curiosity, not being afraid, diving in. And the number one tool that I think for curiosity now is perplexity. It's not searching in Google. It's searching in perplexity. It's like Google. You put in what you want to learn. But it doesn't give you a bunch of sponsor links that are advertisements. It gives you immediate knowledge. It tells you where I got that knowledge from the web. It writes you with a generative AI response. It writes you out an answer as a co-pilot. It gives you the next three questions you might want to ask to learn more. Matt Burton: And it lets you keep that theme in a collection that you can keep for yourself, your team, or share with friends. So I think all this stuff with AI starts with curiosity. You turn me on to perplexity. And I have had a blast playing with it and using the co-pilot. I think it's fascinating. And I don't think I've shared this with you. I took a course on prompting chat GPT. And I learned so much about, hey, you got to provide it context. You know, I used to think less is more when I started using chat GPT. It was maybe a sentence was my prompt. Now I find myself writing a lot up front to really hone in and clarify the output that it's going to give me. Josh St. Laurent: So I think my question for you is, are there things that people should be focusing on learning, or maybe people should start with something like a perplexity? Like what is your advice to someone trying to pull their skills, I'll say, on AI, or take advantage of AI to use it, whether it's in their life or their business, or there's certain areas they should be focusing on, maybe developing better prompts, or should they be just using AI in a specific way to start in your opinion. Matt Burton: In my opinion, there's so much value in learning even a little bit about prompting. The more you learn, the more they start to call it engineering. And there are schools and teachers that will teach prompt engineering. And I went to one of these schools. I'll tell you that I found the teacher for that school on TikTok. I have found fantastic teachers on TikTok, on Instagram, on LinkedIn. So these social platforms where people choose to offer what they know are real, real value. And so whatever platform your listeners use the most often, wherever they feel most comfortable, I would say start there, kind of like you and I used to in our financial advisory work. Matt Burton: You want to go where you're comfortable and start there. So I love perplexity for asking questions, because I think anybody will get comfortable very quickly there. And then I love chat GPT, and it has competitors, but I love chat GPT. I pay for the pro plan 20 bucks a month. I think it's a fabulous value for 20 bucks. I pay the 20 bucks for perplexity as well, because I think it has value and I'm really interested. Open AI's chat GPT is one of the best at generating answers. And you can go in there and I'm sure you know this already. You can go in it and really tell it who you are. My name is Josh. This is my line of work. These are the kinds of clients I love to help. And this is how I like to give answers. I don't want to go on too long. Matt Burton: I want to give concise answers. I want to stay non technical. So you can give it all this advice, providing it guardrails and guidance to how you're going to do things. And then like you said, in chat GPT, you can do some simple engineering and say, I don't want a five page essay. I want it to be this length so that I can share it in an email. And the context is this is what we talked about in the past. So I want it to be responsive to know those. So you give it some context and it's much more useful. And then I think people should just be themselves. Tell the tool who you are, then tell the tool in your in little engineering piece, the kind of response you want. Josh St. Laurent: Such good advice. I'm thinking through the best way to ask this about, I mean, you see, I feel like on a daily basis, a new AI tool. Or typically it's a tool that's always existed and now they've layered AI on top of it, right? Or it's a new iteration of the tool we're all familiar with. But now it's got AI built in. Is there to your knowledge one place that we can go and search for AI tools, sort of a repository of all the different technology that exists? Because I don't think I've come across that never really dug into it too deeply. But I was curious to ask you, like if someone says, well, I'm in this very unique industry. I don't know, I'm a real estate agent. And there's got to be an AI tool out there to make XYZ part of my job easier. Is there a place that they can go look for something like that? Or maybe it's as simple as going on perplexity and asking it, but I wanted to ask you that to search for a specific tool. Matt Burton: That's great. So I'm going to give you three answers. One, it can be as easy as perplexity, especially when you know you're in a specific industry. So that's a great route. Go there. It's fast. But the second one is just funny. There is a website called, there's a tool for that. Or I think it's called, there's an AI for that. So if you and I were to Google that right now, we would find the website and either there's a tool for that or there's an AI for that. But the third thing I'll say, I'm going to name drop this guy, digital creator called Matt Wolf, because his site, pretty sure is called Future Tools. Now I'm going to look that up because I think he's really worth knowing about. And he's worth knowing about because he not only has this fantastic website that everyone is copied in some way. Matt Burton: And in the age of AI, it's very easy to copy or imitate other people. The reason Matt Wolf is worth knowing about is because he also has a YouTube channel and he describes all these things out loud. So I'm a real fan of his that will future tools. I definitely subscribe to it. Josh St. Laurent: Yes. So I would either go to probably I would go to perplexity or I would go to future tools. I have used there's a tool for that or there's an AI for that, specifically when I was looking to work with some accountants, I just wanted to see what tools existed for the accounting industry. And it's generative AI is not generally good with numbers. I wanted to know how people were trying to hack that. Get around that. Matt Burton: It's funny. You go there. I've looked at something recently as a professor. I'll kind of switch gears to I'll say like the pitfalls or maybe the dark side of AI, right? I've had a couple other professors kind of come to me and we've, you know, we've sort of had this conversation around like, well, how do we know if students are using AI, right? And maybe not so much using it, but turning in something that's 100% AI. And so I'm sure you've seen, you know, there's GBT's that have been created that'll scrub a document and basically say, yeah, this is 94% AI. What other pitfalls are there or things that people should watch out for like what in your opinion, like is the dark side of AI? Because of course, in any instance, in any new technology, there's good use cases and then maybe not so good use cases. How do you see that evolving over time? Matt Burton: So in the whole field of technology, there are companies, there are established incumbents who develop technology. And because they have so much at stake, they often want to make things that are proprietary that are locked down. And because of their reputation, they will tend to do things that are good. They'll have guardrails. They won't allow bad youths if they can stop them. And then there's another trend, which is very important to technology and the evolution of tools, systems, and that's open source. And so the greatest threats probably don't come from the incumbents. They don't come from Microsoft, Google, Facebook. We saw in election cycles. We've seen disinformation spread on Facebook. We've all read about that. So these bad things can happen in big companies. In a twist of fate, Facebook changed its name to meta because they wanted to focus on a 3D virtual reality, the Metaverse, which was first written about in this book called Snowcrash, which is an amazing book, which I can't even read because it's so long I've listened to the audio book on like multiple commutes and still didn't finish it. Matt Burton: But I got the idea. The Metaverse started in science fiction with this writer a long time ago. And we took on this word Metaverse and Meta changed their name from Facebook to Meta. They were focused on that being the next big thing. And you need a lot of money to develop in that space. And that might have continued evolving had COVID not ended. But COVID ended and AI came out of one of these mini miniature AI winters. So AI was first talked about about 200 years ago in England. When they created the first algorithms during the industrial revolution, they made algorithms to make a machine count. It was a counting machine. And this guy made a counting machine and this woman, Ada Lovelace said, if I give you a better algorithm, it won't do simple math. It will do complicated math. It'll do amazing things. Matt Burton: So I'm just throwing that out there. AI started a long time ago. Sometimes it gets hyped. Then it doesn't work. Everybody gets disappointed. The money goes away. There's no support for it. People don't talk about it. And it goes into an AI winter. Before COVID, AI was the bomb in Silicon Valley, right? Before you came to our office, the six months that I was there before you, AI was it. COVID comes, AI goes away. COVID ends, AI comes back. During COVID, it was all about the metaverse and crypto. Everybody was into cryptocurrencies. And sometimes you think these things go away, but they do come back. So if you look at crypto now, which crashed with Sandbank, McFreed, crypto is back now because they really did develop their technology in the systems. And now Kathy Wood at the ARC funds. Now she has an ETF that's launched and supported by our regulators and crypto is kind of back, but quieter. Matt Burton: So this happens with technologies with AI. Facebook actually had a crypto solution called Libra, but it didn't work. They threw a lot of money into it. Then they threw money into the metaverse. Then they found out that they were behind with AI. And I'm telling this long story because what's interesting now is Facebook got behind Google. They got behind OpenAI. So they got into open source and they released Lama to the world. And now they have open source developers developing another language model that's really supported by Facebook. But this all started with your question about what's the dark side. The dark side is when these language models in generative AI that can make stories and pictures and videos gets into the hand of bad people. So I'll tell you three quick areas where it's going to affect things. When you make things that are not true, but can affect outcomes in life, you can affect political races. Matt Burton: So you can make a lot of propaganda. You can have Biden or Trump say or do something that's not true and it will look real. You can take a man or a woman or a boy or a girl from down the street and you can create images that are not true and they can be bad images. And this happened in Spain, happened to kids in middle school and high school. These made pictures of girls that were not true, but they had the true girls faces. It can be humiliating and destructive. So it can affect politics, it can affect the community. And if you read Mustafa Suleiman's book, Mustafa Suleiman is a man that was the co-founder of DeepMind Day in England made a computer that beat not just a chess player, but beat the hardest game in the world, the game of go. There's a movie called AlphaGo. Matt Burton: Mustafa Suleiman and Demis Fisabis were these two partners that made DeepMind and they know that you can get these models not just to beat games, but you can get these models to do things like build bombs. So Mustafa Suleiman is working with governments around the world. He's in Davos this week talking to world leaders about the dangers of AI that you can have a single bad actor, not a nation state, not a country, but a single person with a bad intent can get their hands on the knowledge of the world, of everything that we know, and figure out what that person doesn't know how to do, and they can release some chemical agent or pestilence or virus on the world, and they can do it by themselves. So it's not a little bit bad. It's really bad, potential. When you get the potential of a computer to take over things, it's serious. Josh St. Laurent: And correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems to me like the genie's out of the bottle in a way, right? Like AI is here to stay. I think the focus really becomes more about how do we regulate this? How do we protect from these situations from happening? Because I don't see AI going anywhere. If anything, let's say hypothetically 10 or 20% of people are using AI right now, I only see that number growing over time. I mean, what do you think? Matt Burton: It's only going to grow over time. I just thought of a fourth area. An article I read this week was about JP Morgan and the dollar amount they spend annually now in the multiple billions to fight off against cybercrime. And I don't know the statistics. How many hits per day they're fighting against? But the genie is out of the bottle. Individuals and groups of individuals have these tools. They're going to go looking for money. They're going to go looking for leverage or power. They're going to steal information. They're going to blackmail people. They'll do a variety of things. And you need to have an equivalently strong set of tools, artificial intelligence people, and white hat hackers to fight them. Human nature doesn't change. Our human nature remains the same. Our tools and our weapons change. Josh St. Laurent: Seems like something that has a potential to change the world as we know it as far as how you and I grew up versus kids now. I mean, I can already see how different it already is. Matt Burton: I would tell you one of the biggest trends that I see is borders are shifting. If you think about some of this, I've talked about cryptocurrency. I've talked about the metaverse and I've talked with you about artificial intelligence but take them all together and one thing technology is doing is erasing borders. If you look at our country, the USA, there are those who feel while we're all immigrants here, other than the indigenous Native Americans, we all came here at some point. Our families did. Even if it's the 15, 16 hundreds, we came here. Other people continue to come to this place, to this land for opportunity. But there are those who want to shut down the borders. That's a theme that exists. Open borders and closed borders. But it extends not just to things like immigration, it extends to currency. If you grow up in Argentina or you grow up in Greece or Portugal, you can't truly save money the way you can in America because you may not be protected by the law because the inflation is too great because you have to change your currency to a hard currency. So we're very fortunate in the USA to have a much more stable currency and it's actually the reserve currency for the whole world. Matt Burton: China has tried to build a stable currency so they could be a reserve. The European Union came forward with what they hoped would be a reserve currency stronger than the dollar. But to date, no one's had a currency stronger than the dollar. You look at the nation of El Salvador and they said we're going to use Bitcoin as our reserve. That didn't quite work out. But these are efforts to remove borders and give people a new type of equity or equality. So I'm not expressing a political opinion here but I'm expressing a trend. The genie is out of the bottle that people want equity. When I go in various forums online to talk about eye creation of images or AI text becoming movies, you know, making digital films from AI, the people that are creating things may be found in Romania, they may be found in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Texas, in Maine, in Vancouver. Matt Burton: They're all over the world. They're cross borders. When you look at people doing services, I worked recently for a company where I was their AI consultant but their graphic design consultant, Lichten Buenos Aires. And so I'm just seeing more of that trend of the workforce or the global workforce and that rush shift many things including how we build well and how we need to protect ourselves and build well before our jobs shift here. So one AI trend I would say to everybody is talk with your financial advisors and even more talk with your financial planners. It's more important to have a plan probably than to have investments per se. Have a plan. These are trans I'm saying because I think things are shifting a lot in the world. Really, I'm opening to hear that. I want to kind of zoom in, pivot a little bit but piggyback off of what you're talking about. Josh St. Laurent: A lot of people listening are entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial minded, maybe not even there yet, maybe they're still working for a corporate America by considering taking the leap or people who invest in real estate. Those are another kind of segment of people. How do these people take AI in the technology that exists and knowing all that you're talking about in the direction that it's heading on a micro level? Let's say how do they use it for good to make their own lives better, to be more efficient in their businesses, free up time to spend with their families? How do they use AI to improve what they're already doing? Matt Burton: There are probably so many ways to keep it simple. I would focus on the time saving aspects and the fact that everyone's got to take responsibility for themselves. When you're an entrepreneur, when you're part of a home, a household, you've got to take responsibility for yourself, how you earn money, how you spend money, your strategy for the future for your children, a variety of things. Matt Burton: Taking responsibility, sometimes it takes time. One thing AI can do is help us save time. Taking responsibility sometimes means scenario analysis. Let's spitball. Let's brainstorm. Let's think this through to a logical conclusion, those kinds of things. AI in both of those things, how would you save time? How would you strategize? Just a few things real quick. When you know that you want to read a book by a smart person or you want to watch a two-hour video by somebody that you really respect because you might get nuggets of wisdom on what to do for your own family, you sometimes find you don't have time to watch that video and the others. You don't have time to read that book and the others. You don't have time to read that article, but you want the nuggets of wisdom. Here are some simple things. AI can read the book for you and give you a summary. Matt Burton: AI can watch the YouTube video for you and give you a summary. That's saving time. AI can write you a business plan. If you tell it, I have summaries from these five books that were recommended and these 20 YouTube videos that were recommended. I'm going to feed these summaries into you. This is what I want out of them. What would you tell me if you would play the role of my business advisor or even my business partner or I'm the engineering genius, but I need a marketing person. I can't afford one. I want you right now to be my marketing person. Now I want you to be my VP of sales. You can build a virtual team, come back with the same data. Ask that chat GPT, those structured questions that you mentioned before, a little bit of context. Be my sales person, be my marketing person, be my HR person. Matt Burton: Tell me how to deal with these issues and let me envision a five-year growth plan for my family or my company. You can save time by having it summarize. You can save time by having a spitball with you. I think these are very real skills everyone should learn. Which again is why I designed a course a couple of months ago, but I've come back round to going, how would I do this in 2024? If somebody wanted to transform their personal business, not that it's real estate, not that it's storage units, not that it's mobile home parks, not that it's selling ice cream, just what would I do if this were something everyone should know? Matt Burton: Everyone should know how to save time reading and watching videos. Everyone should have a virtual business team. Everyone should be able to make a virtual vision board and they can do this generating images, generating text, getting virtual counseling. And will this put some people out of business? It will. It'll put some business coaches out of business. It's going to put some therapist out of business, etc., etc., etc., but it's going to enable other people to do things. It's going to free up time. I think it's amazing. That's why, like this point in my life, there is nothing else I want to do but help people learn these things because I do believe the fabric of work is going to be disrupted across the world, not just our country. And I think that gives us a lot of scary things ahead and tremendous opportunity. It's really exciting. Josh St. Laurent: I'm fascinated by it as well. This is probably more for a part two, but you got me thinking about how you can build your own model now and put in your own documents for the AI to basically read and learn and remember so that you can go interact with them. And I think that that is a fascinating concept. I was playing with one the other day, someone else had designed that was supposed to be like a business consultant and they had dumped a couple, you know, Hormoz e-books in there or whatever it was. And you could ask questions about marketing and business planning. And I just think that's fascinating to be able to, at the tip of your fingers, go and leverage that sort of knowledge and information instead of having to go and, you know, read the whole book and highlight it and take notes. And it's a time saver. Also very disruptive, like you said. You're very disruptive. Matt Burton: It's open AI created this tool year, year and a half ago. And then two months ago, they said, we're going to give you a way to build your own generative tool with your own knowledge that you pack into it. And we're going to open up an app store and you're nodding. That's probably where you found that tool from the friend. So you and I can build those. We can make them public. There's going to be a way that they're sold or that you monetize it as an entrepreneur. But back to an earlier comment I made, there are some dangers. One, you can be quickly imitated. That's one danger. Two though is privacy and security. If you put very important private things into that tool, they can also be extracted from that tool by any number of people. So you've got a kind of firewall, anything that's precious to you or important. It can't go into a public tool. And this is something people need to keep in mind. Josh St. Laurent: That's a great point. I have a feeling we'll be doing a part two at some point to really dive deeper into all the, you know, six months from now, I'm sure everything will be totally different, right? Matt Burton: And everyone will have their own GPT at that point. We'll see. Josh St. Laurent: But I do want to transition into kind of the three questions I like to ask or Zanne, a little more personal to you, big picture. So first question is what is living a wealthy life look like for you? Matt Burton: I think the greatest sense of wealth would come from just a few things, knowing that you could do with your time what you want to do, knowing that you could, for me, knowing that you could be proud of what you're doing to earn a living and how you spend that time. So you could be selfish, so you could be proud of what you do with your time. And more specifically for me, wealth just means the freedom to use time to create things, to make stuff for me. I want to make things. So if that's a digital creator making videos or designing a course for people to learn, it's that. But also if it's going back to my screenplay about unboxing a robot, which I've only partially written, if it means going back to that screenplay and finishing it, then that to me is wealth. If I didn't say I already had traveling, I want to meet more people. I want to see more things. I want to see more of the world taste more of the foods. I want to surf more of the locations. I just want time to do things. You ride a motorcycle. My wife doesn't want me to ever ride a motorcycle or surf for that matter. To me, freedom means riding a motorcycle, surfing or driving down highways, seeing the world. Absolutely. Josh St. Laurent: If you could give one message to someone working to gain financial freedom, who isn't there yet, what would it be? Matt Burton: In light of this conversation, I would say think about what makes you excited and be curious and look for a way to back that thing, that person, that idea, that trend, invest in something. And if you're not sure what to invest in, save money and get a decent return on it. Just save it. My mother was a college teacher. She put away a little bit money, a little bit of money all the time from her job. And her mom worked at the cosmetics counter of a store. And she saved money a little bit of a time. My grandmother lived into her 90s and always sent us birthday cards with cash or a check in them. Her sense of wealth was giving way to others. She did it just by saving a little bit. Matt Burton: If you go beyond that, there's so many ways to invest in the public markets in real estate that I think people should do what gives them joy beyond just the investment if they can go the next step. Do something you love. If you love gardening, get a property and have a garden and garden. Josh St. Laurent: It's so true. That's such a good message. Josh St. Laurent: If you only had a thousand dollars and you're starting over, what would be the first thing you would do with that money? And I'm going to tack on to that. How would AI fit in if you were starting over with a thousand dollars? Matt Burton: You know, in the past year I went online. I said, I wonder if I can build a consultancy and teach and sometimes teach in companies and help them transform. And could I build a business around myself first and other employees and partners afterwards and what would that look like? And is it even viable? And so just with the $20 for buying chat GPT and personalizing it to me with its tools, I spent four hours in an afternoon, four hours and 20 bucks and came up with a business plan that told me that particular idea was viable and could even become an investor-backed company if I wanted to build it that way. If I wanted to manage the employees, then I would do this. Then I would go to those kinds of companies and get those kinds of contracts. And it helped me brainstorm and build out a five-year plan to grow an investor-backed company to get the kind of, you know, ten or a hundred X return, whatever I was putting in that day to get a larger return. I looked at that particular plan and said, that's not the way I want to build this. That won't give me a sense of, well, it's too much for me. I actually want to throw that piece of paper away and start here. But I would start with 20 bucks and four hours and start brainstorming and figure out what pathway forward for me. It partly involved leaving the Bay area to reduce my burn rate so that I could evolve organically without any investor capital so that I owned everything that I built. So I wasn't going to people for capital, but I was going to them for collaboration where we all contributed our share. So for me, it helped me get clarity. And I would say to somebody, take some of your money and get clarity. If you're a creator in the digital space, take some of the money and buy the tools, create a brand in a website and build. Josh St. Laurent: Mike Jock, that's beautiful. I love it. For everyone listening who wants to connect with you, where is the best place for them to look you up online? Matt Burton: Oh, that's a great question. I appreciate it. I'm active on LinkedIn and Twitter or the X platform. And the way you look me up is you look up a subon AI on LinkedIn. That's my username is subon dash AI. There's a website of the same name, subon dash AI dot com, which is a work marker to be built out. And Twitter again is subon AI or just my name Matt Burton. Josh St. Laurent: Perfect. I'll go ahead and put those links in the show notes for everyone to come and track you down. I recommend connecting with Matt on whatever your favorite social media platform is. That's great. Well, thank you for being here on the show. I've enjoyed this. This has been really fun and insightful. So thank you. Matt Burton: It's been a pleasure, Josh. Thank you so much. We should do a part two in a few months. Josh St. Laurent: Absolutely. This has been the Wealth in Yourself podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Matt Burton. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. The Wealth in Yourself podcast is hosted by me, Josh St. Loren, an edited and produced by Ray Heycraft. To learn more about how to make your money work for you, visit us at www.WealthInYourself.com and connect with us on all social media at Wealth in Yourself. This podcast is educational in nature and is not meant to be investment advice. Most do not construe anything said to be advice and the opinions of the guests may or may not represent the opinions of Wealth in Yourself. This podcast and the information presented are separate from my employment at Goldengate University. Still, they are part of my mission to make no cost financial knowledge more accessible. If you like the show, please take a moment to leave us a review. We read all of your feedback and we want to make sure we cover the topics that matter most. If you have a specific subject you'd like us to explore or a guest you'd love to hear interviewed, don't hesitate to shoot us a direct message. And as always, thanks for listening.