AI Should Amplify Humanity

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I am the human voice of AI in the industry, right? I want people to realize that AI can make you more human. Where we are in this space of time, what is going to separate you from the advisor down the street is your humanity, not your tech. Your tech is going to support your humanity. So my entire existence here at Zox is to help people regain their humanity. It's making it so that people understand that humanity is something that is not going to be replaced. What it can't replace is face-to-face. It can't replace listening. It can't replace engagement. And it can't really replace empathy and understanding. And that's where I think our company is very, very different than anybody else in the marketplace because everybody else is about feature, feature, feature efficiencies, you know, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that stuff's great. What do you do with it? We were at the wealth.com EstateCon conference. And this woman came up to me and she said, Hey, I want you to know this. Zox changed my life. You know, I'm looking around, she's like, Who are you looking for? I was like, I am I on camera. She's like, No. Everything that Zox is building is for that single goal is to make advisors' lives

Welcome And Matt’s Mission

SPEAKER_02 1:10

better. Welcome back to the top 50 most innovative voices in advisor growth.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

I'm your host, Paul G. McManus. In this episode, I'm joined by Matt Halloran, chief evangelist at Zocks and the self-described human voice of AI in the industry. Matt has spent more than two decades coaching financial advisors, has written three books, delivered a TEDx talk, and appeared on more than a thousand podcasts. Today, he helps advisors understand how to use AI without losing the human connection that made them successful. In our conversation, we explore why the real question isn't whether AI will replace financial advisors, but what advisors will do with their time once AI handles more of the invisible work. Matt shares how tools like Zocks can give advisors 10 hours back each week while helping them become more prepared and present with clients. We also discuss the concerns around privacy, control, and over-reliance on technology, and why Matt believes AI should make advisors more human, not less. And finally, we dig into influence, how books, podcasts, and borrowed audiences can help advisors build trust, become more visible, and turn their expertise into greater impact. Before we jump in, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel or wherever you're listening so you don't miss a new episode of the top 50 most innovative voices in advisor growth. And now, here's my conversation with Matt Halloran. Matt Halloran, how are you doing? I'm doing well, man. It's nice to see you again. It's interesting. You and I met, I want to say a couple years ago. You were in a different role back then, and I was on your podcast and really enjoyed you. So I'm really excited to have you on this series today. And just in the past, I want to say year or so, my timeline might be off, but you know, I started seeing you and you had this hat on, you know, that said something like Zox, which I'm like, okay, what's that? So the question is, what the heck is Zox?

What Zocks Automates Behind Scenes

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Yeah, so we are a full-blown AI assistant for financial advisors. The overall goal is to take what Michael Kitsis calls the invisible work, right, which is all of the non-client facing stuff, find out what can be automated, and then automate it and integrate it. So there's like two big steps there. So not only are we automating an enormous amount of, you know, 10-key minutiae when you're keying in the same thing into 10 different places, now we do that for you, but we also integrate, right? So a client comes up and says, you know, hey, I got married twice since the last time I saw you. I adopted six children, I started a nonprofit organization, and I moved my state of residency to Brazil. It actually will tell that to like eMoney and your CRM and your tax planning tool and all of those different integrated systems. I I like to refer to it as an Oreo cookie. So the advisor is the top part of the cookie and your tech is the bottom part of the cookie. Zox is the yummy stuff in the middle that makes it all communicate together.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

That is amazing because I would imagine for many advisors, that, you know, maybe some have an assistant, maybe there's someone that comes, you know, does a meeting prep and does all these things. You know, maybe some do themselves and everything in between, but that's probably the least favorite part of the job and probably in some ways the most unprofitable, meaning that their time is best spent in front of a client, talking, talking to clients, not doing any, you know, not doing the follow-up, which is necessary, but not necessarily the most glamorous part of the job.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

Well, and it isn't glamorous, and it's where most people fall down. I I've been in practice management and financial services for over 20 years now. And the big issue that I always dealt with with the firms that I worked with was any meeting prep, right? Advisors are going from meeting to meeting to meeting and they're not prepared, right? Uh, you know, I'm sorry if that shocks your audience at all, but the advisors know that, right? And then the follow-up component. So they do what they love to do, they're face-to-face, belly-to-belly with their clients, they're solving problems, they're having great conversations, they're finding out about, you know, their client's life. And then that client leaves and they have to go to the next client. What our system solves is with one click of a button, the meeting prep is taken care of. There's an AI note taker, which is not recorded. So it's a live transcription, much like having a court stenographer in the room with you. And then we also help you with all the follow-ups, putting tasks in your CRM, helping you create a summary email, updating your CRM with all of the new fields and all of the other integrated services. This is the stuff. So when I first started here, Paul, I just this is ridiculous. I was with two of the most senior salespeople. We were at the wealth.com EstateCon conference. I had been here for like two weeks. And this woman came up to me. Her name is Sheika. I still talk to her. I actually talked to her today, surprisingly enough, but she came up to me and she said, Hey, I want you to know this. Zach's changed my life. And I was, I thought I was Ben Hayes, dude. Like I thought the new

Meeting Prep And Follow-Up Solved

SPEAKER_02 6:05

salespeople were, you know, poking fun at the old guy, right? You know, I'm looking around, she's like, Who are you looking for? I was like, I oh, am I on camera? She's like, No, you need to understand. So she's the director of operations for a large RIA. And half of her team, all they were ever doing, Paul's chasing the advisors down for the perded information they needed to be able to do the prep or do the follow-up from the client meetings. She's like, I get all of it. They just go from meeting to meeting. Now, my team is in the loop with all of that stuff. And this is so huge. And it's huge for a big reason. It's not just because they're going to be more profitable, which they will be. It's not going to be that they're going to be more efficient and accurate, but they get to be more human, Paul. And that's where I hang my hat every day, all day, as the chief evangelist at Zocks, is because when your confidence is increased, you're prepared for your client meetings, your presence and awareness during those times is fundamentally changed to truly finally be client-focused.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

One for a point of clarity that I don't personally understand, because I half joke that I'm an early adopter. And by early adopter, I mean that I got into it way, way back in 2022, you know, before Chat GPT became a thing. You know, I use all the AI tools. I'm a big fan. My car is a Tesla. It drives me, you know, I'm probably not safe to drive on the road today myself. One thing that you said that I don't personally understand is that you said it's not recorded. I think you said. Help me understand it. Because like I record meetings, this is being recorded. I have, you know, transcriptions in the background. I don't understand what that means specifically.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

So it's live transcription. So it's just like having a person in there taking notes for you. So there's no recording of the audio, no recording of the video. So everything that Zox does is in real time. And

Privacy First Without Recording

SPEAKER_02 7:47

here's why we went in that direction. It's because ultra high net worth and high net worth do not want to be recorded because of deep fakes, right? That's like one of the biggest concerns that they have. Any legacy recording of their voice or their image can be used against them. So when we were building this, and it actually slowed us down going to market, but when we built this, it was privacy first, 100%. That's how we built everything. So it's like the stenographer who's just sitting there and, you know, using that weird keyboard y thing, which I still don't understand how any of that works, but that's what's happening. So in real time, it's translating and then getting rid of that whatever, right? Because it's not a recording, it's just listening. That's probably the best way to say it. It's just listening and writing stuff down for you.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

And so if I understand it correctly, in real time, like the the notes, the the follow-up tasks, these things, is it does it wait till the end and then process, or is it like actually taking action in real time in terms of any action items? It is in real time.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

You just don't get it until afterwards. Okay. I mean, you can technically ask it questions while it's transcribing because it is processing things that quickly. But the big thing for advisors to understand, they're in a client meeting, they don't have to take physical notes anymore. They're in a client meeting all of their prepositions. Well, so that's a great question. And surprisingly enough, that's one of the reasons I have a job, brother, is because I'm here to remind advisors of the humanity that is actually what's made them so successful. It isn't their freaking trading platform or their financial planning tool or the tax planning tool. It's the face-to-face interactions that they have with their clients that makes them who they are. And now, because of you don't have the worry of all of the minutiae, the invisible work, right? You're just going to be able to be more human with AI in your background.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Yeah, and I experience this every day. I don't have the integration. Now I don't know what the word is. Is it AI envy? I need to keep up with the AI Joneses because, you know, I don't have this real-time integration. But I I think just, you know, staying on the point of the not recording, especially as you said, with the high net worth people, just anyone privacy. This is personal information, you know. I mean, there there is a concern there, I'm sure. I think that's extraordinary. I guess in my mind, and I'm I'm I'm like you're I'm like the pre-sold. So I'm like, okay, sign me up today. Where do I go? But what are some of the concerns that anyone has about adopting this today?

Control Fears And The Trade-Off Law

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I only see the the positive, especially given what you just said.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

Well, I believe in something called the trade-off law, right? And the trade-off law is actually how the universe works. This is my opinion, based off of substantial research and science, which basically means that nothing comes from nothing, right? So if you want something, you have to be willing to give up something proportionate to what you want. That's the balance of the universe, right? And so there's five things you can give up: time, talents, treasures, relationships, and control. Okay. So for everything you want in your life, your practice, your personal life, your relationships, those are the five things that you are always managing. And what I'm hearing right now is for a lot of advisor, it's the change, it's the control that they're really worried about, right? It's they they're concerned of what we're doing with the data. They're concerned that it's not gonna capture what they want it to capture, even though their assistants are missing stuff left and right, who's sitting in the meeting with them, right? I mean, you know what I'm saying? Our AI is just doesn't get sick, right? Uh, you know, doesn't take vacations. And we as humans should be doing those things, but that's what these augmented tools are for. And that's and I'm gonna digress for a moment, but I really wish they wouldn't have called it artificial intelligence. I think they should have called it augmented intelligence because that's really what it does. If you know how to use it, it just makes you stronger, smarter, faster, better. So a lot of advisors are just afraid of the control component. They're afraid that they're gonna rescind too much control to technology and they're gonna lose something. But the advisors who realize that this is really what technology was for, this is what all of this has been leading to, and the amount of stress reduction, we're saving advisors, and this has been studied heavily, 10 hours a week of admin work. Dude, that's a week out of every month that you just got back. And so the big question is what do you do at that time? Well, I think you should write a book, but that's okay because you know, you and I have had those conversations. I've written three, I'm working on my fourth. But being able to more successfully market, maybe find a niche, maybe stop working so much and go to your kid's freaking softball game, right? Maybe go out on a date with your significant other every week, right? Maybe you should start working on yourself psychologically because Lord knows a lot of the financial advisors have issues that they need a therapist for. Work on yourself spiritually, work on yourself physically. This is what we're supposed to do with tech, dude, is we're supposed to have it enrich our lives so we can be more human without having to deal with all of this other extemporaneous noise.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

And just in terms of the potential mindset roadblocks, and so what you just said, my own advisor came to me recently and said, Hey, can I have your permission to record, you know, conversations? You know, and I'm like, sure. You know, it's like because I use the technology, I understand it, and I and I understand that it's gonna make the service better because to your point, you know, nothing gets missed, right? It's like, you know, your assistant, as as good as they may be, doesn't always capture everything. Maybe they're sick that day, maybe whatever. And when you have that, you know, whether it's a transcription or the recording in real time and it's doing it, it's completely game changing. It goes back to what you said about the person earlier. It's like it, it, you know, it fundamentally has the ability to change your life. And I don't mean that in an abstract way, I mean that in a very real way, which then leads into what do you do with all this time? I mean, and it's it sounds like a funny question, but it's it's a real question. We've all been, you, me, everyone's been conditioned. I gotta work, I gotta drive, I gotta do this. And then suddenly you see that you don't have to do certain things, and then it's how do I apply my time? And so any other challenges, anecdotes, objections, whether it's the client, whether it's the advisor, anything that you see coming up in terms of why wouldn't I adopt this?

SPEAKER_02 14:00

So I think the biggest thing, and you and I have been around this industry for long enough to remember all of the sky is falling crap, right? I mean, you know, all annuity companies were gonna go bankrupt, right? Uh robo advisors were going to take out all of the in-person stuff, bond market's gonna crap itself and everybody's gonna lose all of their guaranteed money. Right. We've heard all of these, the sky is falling, the sky's falling. And I think that's one of the reasons why advisors aren't adopting AI, right? See, the funny thing is the research that's out there, Paul, basically says that like 50% of advisors are using AI. Well, that basically means they're using freaking Siri or their own chat GPT. They're not using something like

When Clients Challenge You With AI

SPEAKER_02 14:40

actually built for them and their tech stack that understands the language and the industry. So we still have like it's blue ocean. I mean, the amount of advisors that still need to use tech like ours is unbelievable. They're just afraid of it replacing them. And the value you bring is the human value, right? And I just wrote an article for FA magazine that was talking about your client just brought in an AI printout challenging some of the assumptions that you have about investment or financial planning or goal setting or anything along those lines. And a lot of advisors are freaking out, right? But the funny thing is, is they never freaked out when they brought in a yellow pad with all of their notes from all the stuff they heard on CNBC or Fox Business, right? They they never or something from the Wall Street Journal. All of the advisors know that that's already happened. This is no different, but what you do with that is what is important. So let's let's break that down very quickly. So a client comes in, they have a Claude printout of why Claude thinks that your investments are wrong. Okay, because this is happening all the time.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Oh, I'm guilty of this myself. It was Gemini, not Claude, but you know, I had to analyze my tax return and it gave me a couple things. Didn't understand it, but you know, I thought, hey, explain this to me.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

And so what I think advisors should do is first off, be very grateful that their clients are involved in the process. And that's a big mind shift, man. That that's not how most advisors look at this. The second thing is, is it gives you the chance to ask, and this is the most important question, is what was the prompt you used? And here's why. Because whatever question they asked it, that's what you answer. You see what I'm saying? So if you, hey, I want you to look at my investment and tell me what's wrong. Okay, so Paul, so that was your prompt. You were asking about what's wrong. Why did you think your investment, you know, portfolio was wrong? Well, it just isn't performing as well as I'd like it to do. Okay. Well, you didn't ask AI about the performance of this portfolio. This is the stuff that I believe is this next big leap in financial services. And a lot of things for me are coming full circle, which is fascinating to me how the world works the longer you're on this planet. But in like 2009, I helped build a holistic financial planning education workshop for financial advisors at the consultancy I worked for. This is all we talked about. How do you ask the right questions? How do you use redirection, rephrasing, and reframing with your clients in order to really get to the bottom? How do you use techniques like motivational interviewing, you know, really intense, you know, uh engaged listening techniques, all of those sorts of things. Advisors now aren't going to have they're going to still use the excuse, but they shouldn't use the excuse. So I'm too busy. Listen, everybody who's listening to this right now, if you're still too busy, this is a you problem. This is a you're disorganized, you're not giving up control, you're not leaning into the technology that's been built. You now can have 10 hours a week. We're even hearing that that's more in some offices, but I'm sticking with the small amount here because it it's not just you as the advisor, it's your team.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

I want to go back to something that you said about the value, and this is what I firmly believe, you know, having been an early adopter 2022, is that AI is a great yes man, right? In terms of the, you know, the person, you know, questions, the advice, the portfolio, the taxes, whatever it is. If the prompt is, tell me what's wrong with this, oh, it's going to find some stuff. I mean, it'll like just make it up. It needs to. Whereas if you ask the question, you know, more neutrally balanced, or, you know, tell me what's right about it, like, oh, this is fantastic. You know, you're doing so many things great. And so that is where I believe the human value that I think is that is so important today and I don't believe will change is judgment. You know, that's why people need an advisor. That's why I need an advisor, is that judgment. And and ultimately you need to be trusted for your judgment, right? This is just my perspective. If you think that the value is simply getting the information, sure, it's not information. I mean, I can go to ChatGPT today and say, you know, tell me the difference between this, this, and that. You know, that's not the value of an advisor. It's okay, given all these different variables and situations and competing things and my goals, and maybe I'm not even clear on what my goals are because I'm, you know, I have competing interests and family members, et cetera. You know, it's the the process, it's the planning, it's the judgment, the human guidance. I mean, it just goes back to what you're saying. It I think judgment is so paramount. And this gets into how do you let the marketplace outside of your existing clients who experiences it day to day know that you have judgment versus someone just kind of looking at, okay, what do I need for a financial advisor? Well, I can get information online. I can get a CFP and there's a hundred thousand of them, I can get a fiduciary and there's probably, you know, even more. How do you demonstrate to not just your clients, which understand it, but to the marketplace that you have judgment? I don't agree with you.

Connection Beats Selling Your Judgment

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

I don't I don't actually think judgment is the key. I think judgment is the byproduct of a much stronger foundation, which is connection, understanding, and empathy. Okay. So going back to my days as a marketer, I can market that. I can't market judgment. How do you market judgment? I mean, judgment is a wildly personal, very intense, very intentional, one-on-one thing. But I can market the fact that I am a very good communicator, that I have deep relationships with my clients, and that I really truly have an emotional connection to what they're what they want to be when they grow up or their current situation. And the reason why I'm saying that is because that's actually the trend in marketing and probably will be for the next 10 years, is being authentic. Right. So you can still come across as a person who has very good judgment. But Paul, if you told me that you had good judgment, I'm immediately going to think you don't have good judgment. Right. When somebody says, you know, hey, you can trust me. Nope, uh, you're out, buddy. Because you that those are things you have to show. Now, can I show you that I'm a great communicator? I can't. Can I show you I have deep connections with my clients? Absolutely. Can I show that I actually have empathy for your situation? Maybe not full understanding of it, but at least I can pull that boat up right next to you so that we can go ahead and take this journey, however long that journey is, whether that's this meeting or our entire lives together, that we're gonna have a real deep connection and you're gonna feel heard, which is, I think, one of the biggest reasons why people feel so lonely today.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Yeah. This is great. I love this as an opportunity to, I call it iron sharpens iron. Let's approach it that way. So I agree with what you said, and I think connection absolutely, 100%. And now there's even less excuse not to be present, right? I mean, it's like if you're not present and your AI note taker's doing it, Houston, we got a problem. Yeah, yeah. Your job is to be present. I I do want to push back on judgment though, because it because I totally agree. You can't say, Matt, the reason you want to hire me is I have judgment. You know, it's okay, great. Judgment, though, and and this is the way I see it, your clients understand judgment because they experience you, right? And so they trust you. This is why most advisors say I'm a referral-led practice because they get referrals because people trust them. And why do they trust them? Because both connection but also judgment, they've seen it over time, right? AI doesn't have judgment, or at least it doesn't have responsibility for its answers. That's correct. Might might be the better way. You, as the fiduciary, as the person getting paid, you have a level of responsibility that AI doesn't. I do want to maybe reframe it a little bit, like. Internally for my team, right? So I personally I just hired full-time video editor who works on my video edits, right? And so in the process of hiring someone, you know, because hiring someone's always a risk, right? It's like you hire them, they work out, they don't work out. I went through a process and I came down to the final couple candidates for it. And I said, Great, here is a long-form interview. I want both of you, and this is pre-hire, I want both of you to show me what you can do. I gave them high-level direction, and which is, and I wanted them to use their judgment through their process so that I could actually experience their judgment at the other side of it. And so what I was looking for was not just resume skills or someone, you know, all those things that, you know, you can say you have skills all day long. I have no idea, but I wanted to see their judgment in action. So that to me is an example of judgment. I've also found, and this ties back into AI and note-taking, is that I've become so much more liberated from my inbox because of AI, because in my case, my my conversations are recorded, but now my my assistant gets those. And the level of confidence that I have in my team able to follow through and execute without me having to go and then re-explain things and do these things that would always be the friction point in doing it and got me kept me stuck in my inbox was not fully trusting the judgment. But ever since I've been using AI and tools like Zox to do this, oh, my life is great because I see judgment in action. One more example, and this is for the advisor, is that yes, you can't just say, come to us, we're a fiduciary and we have judgment. No. But the way that we work with advisors to do that and is long-form content. Now, this can be the form of a book, this can be the form of any kind of long-form content because what people really want, they want to connect with you 100%, but they also want to be able to trust you. And financial advice is 100% trust business. And so why should I go to you and choose you over the other options? And it's because ultimately I want to know, like, and trust you. And that's where being able to demonstrate your judgment in advance of the meeting or through the process, to me, is one of the key areas where it's going to make a difference in marketing. I a million percent agree with that.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

Right. I mean, I think, and that's one of the reasons why I love your system, is because it does build trust by proxy, right? So there is nothing in the world like a really highly successful blog. There is nothing in the world like really great video content. There's nothing in the world like being able to say, hey, I wrote a book. Do you want to know who I am and what I do? Listen, it's a short weed, and that's one of the other things I like about your system is you're not, you know, 400-page book. You know, it's it's a it's an easy book to go ahead and consume so that the clients can say, oh my God, like I really like this Paul guy. I get a good feeling from him. So one of the things that should happen in most conversations, which we should have started with, was an operational definition of the words we were using. Okay. Right. And so the way that you just defined judgment, I will also push back on because I have created an advisory board. And so I have a bunch of advisory boards built into my AI. I've got one for marketing, I've got one for medical stuff, surprisingly enough. I've got one for investments that I show advisors. And so I've created an advisory board of the greatest investment minds of all times. They know what my risk tolerance is, they understand uh, you know, what my investment goals are, and I will upload stuff to that and I will I'll output it for advisors. Okay, this is what it said about whatever you said. That is technically judgment. That is technically making a call on a large set of data, right? But what you said, which I absolutely love, is there are no consequences for AI making those decisions. And AI is meant to please you. That's exactly where it is. And unless you build that challenging component. So, for instance, my new book is called The Trade Off Law. And so I had my AI do a substantial amount of research. I mean, it was days and days and days of research that just I kept challenging it and asking it questions. And it came up with this really, really unbelievable research study. And I said, okay, I am gonna use this research study in my book. You know, I need you to make sure that it's, you know, citing references, all of the stuff that I needed it to do. But then I said, now I want you to prove it wrong. And it was fascinating what happened because I got like the spinning wheel of death for like 10 minutes because it was trying to figure out how to prove this wrong after it had taken so much time to prove this right. And I think that's again, it's like the super suit, right? When you put on the supersuit, all of a sudden, you know, you're stronger, smarter, faster, better. But you have to realize that there are going to be times where you take that suit off and you need to be you. And I did this, Paul, because I knew that there are two sections in my book from a couple of different communities, and I know that already. So I wanted to be prepared, right? So if you come at me with a, you know, a rebuttal to an argument that I have in the book that's based off of actual empirical data, statistically valid studies, but you are butthurt about it, which is really what's going to happen. How do I address that? And that's actually how you really get AI to become jazz music. And I love this analogy too. Right now, most of you are like in if you weren't in junior high band, you don't know what I'm talking about. But if you've had children or nephews and nieces who are in junior high, it's terrible. It's it's brutal on the ears. It's just horrific to be involved for the 30 minutes that they're playing three blind minds. That's how most of you are using AI. Most of you out there, that's actually what your AI experience has been. You're putting garbage in and you're getting garbage out. When you actually realize how this works and you learn how to challenge it and you learn how to build it, and you learn how to really set a strong foundation. Then when you have something like what they built here at Zox, now you are the supercharged advisor. I'm gonna digress, tell you a very quick story because this goes along with trust building and judgment and all of those things.

Speed To Service Builds Trust Fast

SPEAKER_02 27:56

And so a female advisor was up against three other advisors. They were shopping around the potential clients, they were shopping around to find a new advisor or whatever they needed, an advisor. And so she was the last one. So she was number four out of the three who had already been. So the clients came in. She had done a little bit of Googling and research on who they were and you know what they had sent her, and she but did an analysis through her AI. Clients came in, a prospect came in, they sat down, had an unbelievably great conversation, you know, 90 minutes on the spot, shaking hands, you know, hey, it's wonderful to meet you. Thank you very much for your time. By the time that couple got home, a sample financial plan was already written, because that's what we do. A follow-up email with all of the things that they needed to do and what per firm was going to do was already done. A summary of every single solitary main point that they said was important was captured in an email. And it was there before they even got home. So they get home, as all of us do, they open up their stupid phone, and there's an email, you know, from you know, Jane Smith, the financial advisor. And they're like, Why is Jane emailing us? So the couple opened it together and were like, Oh my God, are you kidding me? And they called her immediately. She picked up the phone and she's like, Hey, Jane, this is Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. We were just in there, like, oh, hey, what's everything okay? Did you make it home safely? And they're like, How did you do this? And she's like, What do you mean? She's like, You have given us more information before we got home than from the three offices that we met with weeks ago. We still haven't heard back from them. You're my advisor. That speed to service, Paul, is how I'm gonna build trust super fast. Because if I don't build that trust super fast, then they're gonna go with another advisor.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Yeah, we actually agree on all these points. We're just coming at it from a little bit different angle. Totally. And using judgment as an example. So everything said I agree with using judgment, it's this is where I believe it's domain area expertise, right? So you writing your book, you're applying the human, your human judgment and guiding it in the direction. And in that case, oh, it's fantastic. I mean, people like us are leveraging it and we're taking the expertise and the judgment that we've accumulated over years and decades. And now we have super intelligence, we have mass intelligence that we can leverage and get information so quickly and apply our judgment through that, sharpen the saw and have even better outcomes, faster outcomes. I think that this would be can be applied to Zox, right? You know, it's like you want the AI with judgment, right? So do you pull something off the shelf, right? That, you know, I mean, there's, you know, a ton of them out there that is applied to everybody, but's not set up with the right judgment for your business, right? Or do you want a company who is specialized, has financial responsibility, is invested, and this is all they do that applies their human judgment to the AI to deliver you the best outcomes you can have. So, so to me, I think we're in complete agreement. Totally. It's it's applying the human judgment to the technology for exponential results.

SPEAKER_02 30:59

Yeah. So I was a philosophy major in in college, which sounds ridiculous, and it really was. But but I learned from all of the greatest thinkers, right? I mean, that's what you do as a philosophy major. We have access to the greatest mind ever, ever. And if we were ever to recover anything from like the Library of Alexandria or any, you know, all of these things that have disappeared, which I'm really hoping they find some of that stuff. And, you know, now we start getting more and more of that stuff in. It's really, really remarkable. So I f I travel a lot for work, you know, all the conferences that Zox does and all of the conferences that I do, and I do a lot of speaking on the human component of AI and how to be more human in your conversations, even though you have tech in the background. It's just one of those things where all I really want advisors to know is shaking hands and kissing babies still is the greatest way for you to grow your business. You you talked earlier about how referrals are the key, right? Could you imagine, because you have access to this now, being able to ask your book of business a question. Now, before it used to be Mary. Mary in your office, she knew everything about every client, every birthday, every anniversary, every grandkid's name, you had Mary in your office. Now, now you've got Zox. Zox is the Mary in your office. And you can say, hey, how many people did I talk to last month about Roth conversion? Whatever. How many did something? Bam, I got a prospect list. Here's another thing. You have a junior advisor that comes in. Hey, I want you to go through and give me a list of every one of our clients who had a child or a grandparent or a grandchild in the last 24 months. There you go. 529 plants. Every single there, there, there's your call, right? And then you take that and you go to your own AI, like your Claude or Gemini or Chat GPT, and say, with all available research, this is like one of the greatest prompts you can have, with all available research, what is the best way for me to begin a conversation about a 529 plan? Oh, you know, hopefully it's gonna spit it out. But again, let's go back to all everything that you have to ever understand about AI: garbage in, garbage out. If you ask it crap questions, you're gonna get a crap answer. If you know how to ask great questions and secondary and tertiary level questions, then it's really gonna work well for you.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

100% agree. And AI providing people with basically some version of superintelligence or I mean back to what you said, augmenting, right? It's not artificial. I think that really is the better word. It's augmented intelligence. I mean, I've said this from day one. I feel like I have superpowers because you can suddenly do things, you can have conversations, you can get insight that before would be like just a question in your mind, right? It's like, oh, I wonder how that would be one day, but you would never resolve it because you didn't have access to this and you weren't gonna go to the library and read 10 books to understand this. Let's shift gears a little

The Real Question Now What

SPEAKER_01 33:49

bit. Okay. You know, my reality has been, and it sounds like, you know, the great work that you're doing with Zox and helping free up time for the companies that you work with is the same, is that it really does become a question of, um, especially from the founder point of view, right? So the people I work with are primarily, you know, founder, CEO, advisors. And so, you know, there's roughly two versions of it. There's the one that wants to optimize towards the enterprise, meaning they want to, you know, put poor resources back in and grow their AUM, et cetera. Wonderful, through people, leadership, et cetera. And then there's the other version, which is more the lifestyle practice, and they want to optimize for their, you know, their income and their lifestyle and everything else. And then you got what I call no man's land, which is the land in between. And so AI opens up some fascinating questions here because, you know, wherever on that spectrum you are, if you get back a minimum 10 hours of your time, and I'm saying this from personal experience, I think it's vastly more if you do this right. Where does the time go? You know, and let's dig a little bit deeper into that because I've I've wrestled with this. I mean, at some point, you know, it's identity. It's like, well, what do I do if I'm not working? It's purpose. You know, this is how I feel good about my day. I mean, I don't want to be overworked, but at the same time, if you're like, you don't have to go work at some level, it's like, well, what do I do then?

SPEAKER_02 35:02

Well, this is the literally billion-dollar question, right? So I think that there's going to be two areas that are going to grow beyond the ability to support the need for these two positions. The first one is therapists. We're already experiencing that right now. There's a huge therapist shortage. People are realizing that mental health is just health and that, you know, you really need to work on what's going on between your ears. But the second thing is real coaches. And so for you, or let's let's do for the growth-minded advisor, because I know you and I have both worked with them forever. The growth-minded advisor, who is always, you know, if you're not growing, you're dying. I gotta go, build, build, build, they're empire builders, right? That's what they want to do. Well, what this allows them to do is to do it so much more effectively and efficiently with better support. So instead of doing what a lot of advisors have done since I started in this industry in 2006, which is literally throwing spaghetti up against a wall and seeing what sticks, now you can throw the proverbial spaghetti up against your AI and test it and test it and test it before you spend any money toward that next world-building venture. So it's still going to do what we want it to do, which is to give you more time. But I'm gonna challenge those people, and this is not a popular statement, but it's just the truth. Have you ever read a book from somebody who works in hospice? Right. So, all of you who want to try to build these unbelievable businesses, that you know, you're gonna have you're gonna be making $100 million a year, at the end of it all, none of that matters, and you will regret doing it. And I'm sorry, I have been a coach and a therapist myself. I talk to my clients still to this day about that, that there has to be more to you than being unidimensional. Unless you're Steve Jobs, LeBron James, or those sorts of people who now, even though Steve Jobs at the end of his life was like, Man, I'm really glad I did everything I did at Apple, but shit, I really should probably should pay more attention to my family, right? And, you know, all of that sort of stuff. That that is what I think that's the conversation this is gonna force people to have. And again, this is a very unpopular statement, is because many of you think that money is gonna fill the gaping hole in your soul. And it is not, all right? You can't keep throwing money into an issue that you have when you actually have to do the work. And that's where I think some of this work is gonna switch. For those advisors who really want a lifestyle practice, ding, ding, ding, winter, winter, chicken dinner, you're here, man. Because I mean, you could literally work half as much as you're working right now, maintain the same income that you have, and go do what you want to do. Go travel, write books, write blogs, read, play music, become an artist, go hike the Appalachian Trail, do live this world with experiences. You know, we're given a huge gift, dude. Every day that you're here, that you're not dead, that you're here is an opportunity for you to just be astonished at how amazing this world is. Even if your day sucks, we're still on a rock flying around a freaking star that if we were a couple miles this way or a couple miles that way, we'd be dead as a doornail, right? This is just an unbelievable gift. And now you're given the one thing out of time, talents, treasures, relationships, and control. There's only one of those things we can't more make more of, and that's time. And you were just given that gift back in a way that you have no excuses anymore. You now can actually have what you want. And that's what I'm hoping AI does for everybody, besides hopefully not coming to kill us all with the, you know, the robots and Skynet and all of that stuff. But I really, really do believe that this is an opportunity for us to truly embrace what it really means to be human.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

Yeah. I've gone through some version of this myself. I would probably identify more with empire builders, aspiring empire builder, you know, as a motivator. And, you know, at some point in that journey is, you know, money was no longer, I mean, you know, it matters, but it doesn't like change my life anymore. It's like it's kind of baked in. You know, now it's increasingly, okay. I still want to, you know, grow, I want to have impact, I want to do all those things. But it's like, this is where I was getting into Aristotle, is like, okay, what is the good life, right? And I'm trying to define this for myself because I I have time, I need the insight, and ultimately I want the playbook so that I can say, okay, these are the set of rules that I believe in that I want to, you know, follow that I can maximize my time here in the world. And so, so I can definitely resonate with a lot of what you're saying. Speaking of time, and this is where I want to uh shift a little bit.

Building Influence Through Niche And Reps

SPEAKER_01 39:40

So, as you know, one of the things that that we do is that we help primarily founder, advisors, CEOs write, publish, and ultimately leverage books. And so one of the reasons I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today is that, you know, I think you are maybe one of the very few people I know who are a professional influencer. I mean that as a compliment. Yeah. And I'll let you tell your own story, but you've written, you know, I mean, media, podcasts, you know, being very public in terms of your presence, writing books, et cetera. I'd love to know just more about your journey. So, I mean, you know, in whatever, you know, version you want to share, you know, tell us a bit a little bit more about your version in terms of ultimately, I think the word that I use is influential, right? So how does someone, whether it's your own story or people that you've worked with or seen, how do they become through their activities more influential? Because to me, that's one of those ways that I'm trying to help steer these advisor founders that we work with to say, okay, I got this free time. I have lots of experience, I have lots of impact ultimately that I can make. How do I capture that so I can not only grow my business, but I can also make a bigger impact in the lives of people? Yeah. Well, impact was all of it for me, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:52

And so I realized very early on in this phase of my life, the last 20 years, that I was saying something fundamentally different than other people were saying. I also realized very quickly that I had to hyperfocus and niche. It is a million times harder to be an influencer if you're trying to influence everybody, right? So if you look at somebody like Gary Vee, so Gary Vanderchuk is probably one of the most famous influencers who grew like six different businesses, but it was first, it was the wine business. So he was shooting all of these videos, and he started getting success there, and then he kind of ventured out into a couple of other things. So I have always consulted independent, successful financial advisors, right? So that has been my very specific thing. And successful means that they actually have a good team, they pay them well, they treat them well, and they really do some aspect of financial services incredibly well, whether that's planning, investment, management, communication, goal setting, whatever, whatever, right? So my journey specifically was once I figured out who I wanted to go after, I just literally tried everything I possibly could. So I my first book was the social media handbook for financial advisors. It was a huge flop. The reason why is because no broker dealers would let anybody use social media when the book came out, which really sucked. That was in 2022, that was in 2012. So that's the one. Yeah, that would have been great in 2012. And so, but the nice thing about it was that increased my I am now a published author by Bloomberg Finance. Okay, bam. Now all of a sudden I have a little bit more of a foundation. I say yes to almost everything because I either believe it's game time or it's practice. And this is one of the things that is very, very frustrating to me as a professional coach. I have my master's degree in life coaching and as a therapist. We're professionals, but we don't ever practice, right? And so I have always taken that to the nth degree. I practiced my talking points before I came on the show, right? I have a whole pregame before I ever get behind the camera. It's off to I do very specific things so they have the right energy, the right mindset, the right focus. I know what my plays are, I know what game I'm playing, I know you send me questions ahead of time, I know roughly what you're gonna ask because I am a professional. I'm gonna show up ready to go. But not every time I'm on camera or I'm doing something like this is game time. Sometimes it's practice, right? And so, you know, I will do that with journalists, and all of a sudden I'm in the Wall Street Journal. And, you know, the other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is the most really influential people are the kindness, the kindest. So my whole life's mission is to spread magic, joy, and love into the world. Everything I do, Paul, every video I shoot, every article I write, every time I speak on stage, my goal is to spread magic, joy, and love into the world because that is what people need. They don't need another big voice with crazy ideas. They need somebody who's gonna remind them that it's okay to be a little bit goofy, it's okay to be a little irreverent, it's okay to love people unconnected. Because look, and if you can hate people for no reason, I can love you for no reason. And I'm going to do my best to absolutely do that. And I also believe that bringing joy into conversations and relationships, people really look forward to having that. And so when I started on my influence journey, you know, I also actually owned an influence acceleration company, right? So my old company that I started with, my co-founder Kirk Lowe, we were influence accelerators. Everything that we wanted to do to teach advisors to be more influential, we tried on me first. And I failed a lot, brother. I mean, we did some, we had some missteps, right? But I think what the issue is, everybody thinks it's gonna be quick. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've coached a thousand offices. I've been on like 1,500 podcasts. I've been publishing every single major trade publication, right? Not one of those things put me over the top, right? I was voted the 10th most influential person in financial services last year. How did that happen? Because of all of the work that I've been doing for 20 years, right? Allowed me to get that level of notoriety. There are ways to accelerate it. And, you know, I I found lots of ways to accelerate it. But what's most important is you have to stay eyes on the prize, right? These advisors who think they're professionals and think that they can half-ass show up to game time, which is meeting with clients and centers of influence. Listen, it's the same garbage in, garbage out. You're not prepared, you're not in the right mindset, you're never gonna play the game at the level that like you and I want to play at. I want to play the hardest games at the heart, you know, against the greatest competitors and the people who are gonna make me stronger, smarter, faster, better.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

So I love this thread in the sense that I agree with everything you just said from my own perspective. And this is one of the things where I'm using my own time to get better, right? You know, because when you're less busy, you have to decide, okay, what is the best use of my time? And to me, it's continuously taking the learnings that I'm having because of AI. In my case, I get the transcription of most calls, I review it, I see what you know, the through lines were, the questions where, you know, maybe I could improve my own response, et cetera. When I go on podcasts as a guest, I know what I'm gonna be talking about, I know what the outcome is, I know what I'm looking to do. When I meet with people, centers of influence, things of that nature, I'm very deliberate. I spend the time to do it right, be more present. And a lot of those activities are things that I'm able to now finally do at the level that I want to because my time has been freed up, right? And so I guess the question I have for you is that for that founder, advisor who now wants to make a bigger impact and take the years and decades of experience and grow their practice and make a bigger impact from the influence. And, you know, it's it it's it's not a one-hit wonder, it's not an overnight success, it's not my video went viral, now I'm famous. Share some of that wisdom that, you know, what are those best practices that allow someone to go from local advisor to whatever that stage is that they want for their marketplace. I love what you said about you, you know, target market. I mean, I think that's hugely important, especially as you want to expand your footprint. Share more from your journey and your experience.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

So

Borrowed Audiences And Podcast Strategy

SPEAKER_02 47:19

the number one thing that you have to do is realize that you're gonna repel more people than you attract. And you actually have to be okay with that. That's where everybody falls down. Most people who want to be influential want to be liked.

unknown 47:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:31

I said the same. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah. And so that that's a huge, huge issue, right? You have to dude, there are people in this industry who loathe me. And I know that they've told me. But there are there are there are Was this to your face or behind your back? Oh, no, uh to my face. I mean, I've had people, I'll I'll I'm gonna digress, tell you a quick story. So I don't dress like most people in financial services. I really never have. I tried that, I look terrible, I look dorky. I just I don't want to be like everybody else. I want to be me, which by the way is the second thing you have to pay attention to. But so I was wearing a Buffalo check shirt, ball cap, custom Air Force Ones, and blue jeans, and I just got off stage at a large conference, large conference. And this this wholesaler comes up to me and he he walks up to I'm at my booth and he walks up to me and he looks at me up and down and he goes, You just don't care, do you? And I looked at him and I said, You care too much, don't you? He was like, Oh. And I said, I'm gonna ask you one question. What do billionaires wear? And he was like, What? I said, Do billionaires wear what you wear, or do billionaires wear what I wear? And he's like, Well, they kind of look like you. So why am I trying to dress like everybody else instead of dressing what I'm trying to be? Right. And and that was a huge thing. So, so number two is the overall idea that you have to be comfortable with yourself. Most people who are really influential have done the work. Paul, you're doing the work, right? You're going back to freaking Aristotle, right, and trying to figure stuff out from what, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 years ago to try to really figure out what is the meaning of life and the meaning of happiness. Okay, right, you're doing the work. So you have to do the work. You also really have to do, and this is the smartest thing you can possibly do to accelerate your influence, is what I call OPP or OPA. Other people's podcasts are other people's audiences. And what you need to do is you have to get your wagon to hitch to other people's wagons. So we did 500 episodes of the Top Advisor Marketing Podcast. Out of those 500 episodes, I probably was able to get on 200 pieces of media because we would do a podcast swap. We're doing a podcast swap. I want all of you guys to know that better practice, better life. Paul's gonna be a guest on our show because we're gonna be talking about, okay, look, you know, what efficiencies have you seen with AI? What, you know, what are you gonna do with that? How are you having a better practice and a better life? Right. This is the game, right? And this is part of how you play the influence game. And again, as I said before, sometimes it's game time, sometimes it's a regular season game, sometimes it's a freaking Super Bowl, right? And there have been a couple of Super Bowl moments where I was on really big shows, right? And I'm telling you, how I warmed up for that one is a little bit different than a normal regular season game versus a practice. And so those are really, really three things. Number one, that you're going to repel as many people as you attract. Number two, you have to really be comfortable in your own skin. You have to know who you are, what you do, and why you do it. And then the third one is hit your freaking wagons, man, and get on as many shows as you can, local television, local print media, speak at local communities. You that's that's where everything begins. And that's where you start practicing before you really get to the big stages.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

Yeah. Again, no surprise. I totally agree. I'll share from my own context there. So I've I've always been like you, I've always believed in the idea of a target audience. I I learned this personally from a gentleman named Michael Port. He wrote a book called Book Yourself Solid as a bestseller 20-ish years ago. And that's where that idea was introduced to me, introduced to me, but I've always believed in that strongly, and it's always given me an advantage because once you can identify who you're trying to attract and influence, then it becomes doable versus trying to influence everyone. You're gonna essentially influence nobody. I mean, even the people that you know ultimately, you know, break through to more of a mass audience, it's unlikely that they started there. You have to build it in iterations over time in most cases. But the thing that you called OPA, so other people's audiences. I refer to this as borrowed trust at scale, you know. Oh yeah. Same same concept. Yep. And it's it's interesting, right? Because especially in financial services or in anything that's a little bit conceptual, you know, it's not like I'm buying a jacket, a pen, something that I can, you know, I can have, okay, price, quality, okay, I can make a judgment. If I make a mistake, it's okay. You know, when marketing yourself and building influence, I think as human beings, I'd love to get your take on this, is that as good as you know, marketing can play a role, there's something about referrals, there's something about borrowed trust. And whether it's done on the individual level where your client is introducing you to someone, or whether it's done on the quote unquote COI level where someone has the people that you want to influence. I mean, that's what I call borrowed trust at scale. If you look at the patterns why people come to you, you know, more times than not, it's like, well, you know, I saw you with Matt. You know, I mean, I grind clients because I was on your podcast. I mean, to me, along the lines that you discussed, you know, my crown jewel, if you want to call it that, was that about a year and a half ago I got on Michael Kitzis' podcast, and he has a massive audience. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 52:35

That's a Super Bowl.

SPEAKER_01 52:36

Yeah, that's the Super Bowl. Now, now, did I start on Michael Kittsis' podcast? No. I think there were about 20 podcasts, and you know, there were some singles, there were some doubles, there were some triples, there was a home run. That one happened to be a grand slam. But it just goes back to your point is that you have to show up, you have to practice, you have to, you have to earn the opportunity, you have to sharpen this all, you have to get better over time. And my belief is that if you want it and you see the clear destination of where you're going, it's completely doable. I mean, it's even more doable today with all the technology and tools that we have. I mean, there's really no obstacles other than your desire and commitment to do it.

Simple Content Habits That Compound

unknown 53:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

I think uh one thing I just want all of your audience to realize is there's an easy way to get started with everything that Paul and I are just talking about, which is when you get done with a client meeting, you grab your phone, you hit record and say, I just got out of a great client meeting. This is what we talked about. You're not giving investment advice. Compliance isn't generally going to have an issue with that, depending on who you work with. But that sort of content is easy for you to do. It's really impactful and easy for people to share. The way that you know that you're influential is when people are literally talking about what you and you're not in the room, right? And I absolutely love that. I'll get on calls with people and say, oh my God, Matt, we were just talking about you two days ago in a meeting. Shit, I wasn't in the meeting, right? That's great. I hope you said nice stuff about me, right? And sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. But but that's the sort of stuff that is super easy from an execution standpoint, right? And and I mean, Paul, with your entire system, every single solitary chapter of my book, right? I can use this for content. There's so much content in this freaking hundred and I don't know how many pages it is, 200 pages, 160 pages. I I can't even get to it all, right? I can literally grab a camera and read a blurb out of the book and go ahead and put it. Gary Vanderchuk was talking about frequency of posting. I I follow him. I actually like him mostly because he's he just doesn't sugarcoat things to people, and I'm a big fan of people being honest. But he said, today, or I'm sorry, he said, this week, I'm gonna post a thousand times. This week. And everybody's like, well, first off, he's got a whole team, right? Whatever. But he's like, I need you all to understand that if people don't want to see my content, they're gonna swipe by it. But that doesn't mean that they still didn't see Gary Vanderchak, right? And so that's the sort of stuff that I think people think they have to get to that, where step one, step one is grab your phone, record a quick video, make sure compliance will approve it, and you need to post that on the preferred platform where your ideal clients are at. And Paul, that that's a kind of a secondary layer of this whole influential niche marketing component of it, which is some of you are all all over LinkedIn. Some of you advisors are all over LinkedIn. And if you're specifically working with fiercely entrepreneurial people, or maybe you're nested in a company like Verizon or Stryker or Pfizer or whatever, right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, right? But your ideal target market, depending on who you're going after, is on Instagram and on Facebook, right? And so you're creating all of this content on LinkedIn where all you're doing is creating more and more noise. If you're looking for pre-retirees who are about to retire, who have a big 401k, they're on freaking Facebook. They're not on LinkedIn. They're getting ready to retire. They don't need to network anymore. And so, really, and that's why I'm I really only exist on LinkedIn, right? I mean, I have other profiles and some of them have a pretty large follower count, but I spend 90% of my time there because that's where I know advisors go. I, you know, I comment on Kitses' stuff and Carl Richards' stuff and you know, Matt Reiner's stuff, all of these big influencers in financial services, because I want when somebody lands on their page and sees that, oh my gosh, Matt Halloran just posted on something Matt Reiner said about AI, you know, and by the way, comments are the new gold on social. It's not you creating the content, it's you interacting with the content is actually going to get you more impressions. Last week I had like 24,000 impressions of just what I did on LinkedIn. That was just my posts. I had another 15,000 impressions from comments, which means 15,000 people saw Matt Halloran, Matt GPT, chief evangelist for Zocks. So when you're looking at when you're asking, you know, people ask me all the time, how did you become an influencer? You know, whatever, that's it. I know the game. I know how to play the game. I'm gonna show up to the game, I know the rules of the game, I wanna play the game, and I practice the game.

SPEAKER_01 57:02

It's interesting because we know each other from, you know, at least a few years back. But what created the my immediate reach out to you for this was literally I had posted something on LinkedIn and you had commented, and they're like, oh, it's Matt. I'm gonna reach out to him and invite him. So proof of concept, right?

Human Voice Of AI And Closing]]

SPEAKER_01 57:19

It works. Matt, I've I've heard you describe yourself as the human voice in AI. Now that's fascinating and intriguing. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 57:28

I want people to realize that AI can make you more human. Now, are there pitfalls to it? Absolutely. Are are there socioeconomic things that we have to be concerned about? Absolutely. But where we are in this space of time, what is going to separate you from the advisor down the street is your humanity, not your tech. Your tech is gonna support your humanity. So my entire existence here at Zox is to help people regain their humanity, right? We are a privacy human first company. That's what we've done. We've wanted to make it so that we're gonna make your lives easier and better. That's our whole focus. Everything that Zox is building is for that single goal, is to make advisors' lives better. Luckily, I'm uniquely qualified to help them figure out what does that mean, right? How do you answer that question? Well, what is gonna make my life better? Is it gonna be another Ferrari? Probably not. Right? Is it gonna be another house? Probably not. Is it gonna be, I don't know, taking some of your wealth and paying for college for a whole bunch of kids who wouldn't go to college? See, now we're starting to get into all of that. And this goes back to my TED talk. It goes back to my book, you know, in my mission, which is to spread magic, joy, and love into the world. My talk was called Hope, Help One Person Every Day. And the whole idea behind that was you can say something, do something, or be present for somebody who needs it. And out of those three things, you can fundamentally change the world. If all of us did one of those things every day, just one of those things every day, this world would be a different place. And so getting back to the, you know, the human voice of AI, that's the foundation. It's making it so that people understand that humanity is something that is not going to be replaced. What makes us humans, AI is not going to be able to get there. It will have human-like things that will disturb the hell out of people, and I totally get it. But what it can't replace is face-to-face. It can't replace listening. It can't replace engagement, and it can't really replace empathy and understanding. And that's where I think our company is very, very different than anybody else in the marketplace because everybody else is about feature, feature, feature efficiencies, you know, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that stuff's great. That's not to be a dick, but that's all table stakes now, right? What do you do with it? And nobody else, except for our organization, in my opinion, is really answering that question.

SPEAKER_01 59:56

Final question. I don't know if it's you and me but had the conversation, but I want to say what's the best place for people to find you? And in in when I asked you that question or some version of that the other day, you're like, yeah, just chat to be team me, just Google me, you know, all of the answers there. So I need to update this question. What would you like people to do to find you? Where would you like them to end up?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

Yeah, well, I'd like for them to end up specifically on LinkedIn. And the reason why is because I'm there, right? I answer every single solitary direct message. I'm the one who's commenting on things, I'm the one who's interacting with things. I love the conversation. I love talking about what we're talking about. It's weird that my whole life has been building to me being the chief evangelist for an AI company. I wouldn't have thought that that's where I would land. It's counterintuitive. It is because and that's why it works. And that's why when I pitched myself to this company with what was called the now what marketing campaign, which was now you've got all of that time back. What are you doing? Now what? And and I think that that is an existential question that isn't going to go away because the tech isn't getting worse. You said it earlier in the show. Today's the worst iteration of this that's been, right? Well, no, no, to be fair, that was 90 minutes ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:10

It's already gone better. All men with that, brother. Yeah. Very cool.