Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? This is Seth and Ajay Sharma and you're listening to the REtipster Podcast, episode 163.

So today we're talking with my good friend Michael Quan. So Michael has done a lot in his life. He ran a successful technology company for over a decade and then sold it to prioritize his family. Since then, Michael has been blogging at FinanciallyAlert.com. Michael is also a published author of The FIRE Planner through Simon and Schuster. And this guy just recently got featured on Good Morning America. I'll go ahead and link to that in the show notes, if you want to check it out.

But the bottom line is, Michael has a deep passion for personal finance and he empowers others to take charge of their financial well-being. And this past May, Michael and I were both at a conference called REWBCON. And at this conference, I sat in on Michael's presentation, where he talked about how real estate investors can use AI—artificial intelligence—to run their businesses.

And, as we all know, AI has been an absolutely huge topic over the past year with the explosion of all kinds of innovative new tools and websites that can be used in many different ways to make life easier and more efficient than ever before. And I've been racking my brain ever since all these things started coming out, trying to think of all the different ways that real estate investors can use AI because I know there is huge potential and opportunity here.

But when I saw Michael's presentation at REWBCON—and I only sat in on the first half of it because I had to run—but just in the glimpse that I saw, I realized he had already done most of the heavy lifting for me. So rather than me trying to teach you what can be done, Michael is going to teach us what can be done. And we'll talk about some of the cutting-edge tools available to you right now.

And AI, I think, is one of those things where your biggest limitation is kind of your own imagination and recognizing what can be done with the different tools and capabilities out there, which is still rapidly changing. Like every single day, new things are becoming possible. But with any luck, after hearing what Michael has to say, you may develop some ideas of your own. And if you do, I hope you'll share them with the REtipster community, either in our forum or our Facebook group.

So with all that said, Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Michael: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me, guys. It's a real pleasure and honor to be on REtipster. And Seth and Ajay, I'm super excited to talk about this topic, because artificial intelligence is really the future of the next technology boom. And I've been blessed to watch and actually, in some ways, profit from the dot-com era back when the internet started taking off in the beginning. And so we're at this new phase where things are just really taking off. And so there are some similarities between how this technology is growing and how the internet first launched.

And so, yeah, today I'd love to just kind of share some ideas that we can talk about relative specifically to real estate investors because this is so new and this technology is so quickly growing, there's a lot of things happening that people aren't even aware of or they're just trying to figure it out on their own. And again, your community is great because I think they're going to get the chance to tinker with it, and there's a lot of just ideas out there that are not necessarily completely hashed out. So we'll talk about some of those. And I'd love to hear the experience of the REtipster community, specifically as well as what you guys are doing. But I'll definitely share some ideas.

I think, first and foremost, artificial intelligence is like any other technology tool. It's a tool. And the great thing about this tool is that it's able to, in some ways, think on its own, which is interesting to think about. Because, in the past, you had these tools that could use very specific things. Maybe it could help you to customize something or cut down time by making your time and tasks more efficient. But with artificial intelligence, we're starting to really use machine learning and create these models that can actually mimic human interaction. And so all of a sudden, we're in this space where sometimes you can't even tell if you're actually interacting with the machine.

And that's actually, I think, a really interesting concept and idea. And people have been talking about this for some time, right? We see it in the movies. We saw it in Terminator 2. We're seeing it with newer movies where AI is going to take over the Earth. So there are a lot of implications beyond what we're going to talk about today.

But for today's sake, in just terms of real estate investors, how can we use this tool to get a better understanding of our markets, to get insights on potentially creating value adds or whatever it may be. We can use these tools to really enhance our ability to become better investors.

Seth: Yeah, and when we say AI, I mean, that's kind of a loaded term. There are lots of different things that qualify as that. We've got ChatGPT, I feel like that's kind of like the big boy that everybody talks about. That's sort of when things started to change really rapidly back in November of 2022. But that's just like talking back and forth to a computer, which is a huge deal given how smart it is and how many things it can do.

But there's also AI for creating music and creating images and fake voices and fake videos. It's just like it goes on and on and on. And I feel like as it continues to develop and as people think of new ways you can harness this technology, it's kind of mind-boggling when you think of how fast that's growing and where it can go.

But when you think of AI, Michael, for real estate investors specifically, what is the number one thing they should be thinking about? Should they be going to ChatGPT and trying to make that do the work for them? Or is there some other website or tool out there where's the opportunity here for real estate investors and even businesspeople in general?

Michael: Absolutely great question. And yeah, obviously it's very far-reaching, so we'll talk about all of them to a certain degree today.

But first and foremost, AI can really help with a lot of automation. And so ChatGPT does a great job of helping us to just refine things, create outlines, parse through data, help us analyze things. It's a great deal analyzer. I don't know if you've tried it yet, but even if you go on to ChatGPT and you start feeding it information that you would have otherwise put into a real estate analysis tool, you can actually just feed it to ChatGPT and it'll start figuring out all of the specifics. And if you're missing some variables, and you want to find out the IRR on a specific investment that you're valuating, it's going to be able to calculate that for you as well as ask you the questions if you're missing some of that information.

So the nice thing about that is all of a sudden, the back-of-the-napkin analysis, I mean, you can do it in the same amount of time to do it on the back of a napkin and get precise information and precise numbers. So you don't really need to any longer go to these websites that have these long forms; you can just put it into ChatGPT and it's going to spit out in terms of like a deal analyzer quickly and relatively accurately.

I would say take all of this with a grain of salt because AI is so new, there are certain things that actually come out that maybe aren't 100% accurate. So you do want to trust but verify, I would say, in these early stages, but for the most part, it's pretty accurate and spot on.

The second part of AI, though, as investors, a lot of times we're driven by the numbers, right? We want to understand what's the risk relative to the potential of a return. And so a lot of times, we're looking at numbers to analyze a deal. And so AI, because it can analyze a lot of information quickly, can help us to make decisions. And so one of the things that I've been digging into a little bit is actually just going straight onto sites like Zillow or Redfin. And there are these little AI plugins that you can use to actually parse all the search results from Zillow. And so, for example, if you get all this information and it gets put into a spreadsheet, what's happening is ChatGPT is going to have a new—I think it's called a plugin, but it's called code interpreter—which allows you to to upload, basically, an entire spreadsheet or some sort of a data set. And so all of a sudden, when you're able to do that, it can basically analyze and find trends for you, right?

And so, before, people had to do this a little bit more manually. Of course, they're using spreadsheets and databases and all these different things. But if you can parse the data specific to an area that maybe you're targeting and you're like, you know what? Find me all the single-family homes that meet this criteria: three-bedroom, two-bath, and meet the 1% rule and have whatever other variables that you're looking at. And you can just have it spit back out the information. I mean, the speed at which you can react over someone else that's not using this technology is going to be incredible. So you're able to make decisions much faster.

So I think that's a really big opportunity. And then even as a business owner, as a real estate entrepreneur, or if you're just building a portfolio, a lot of times we're building a business as investors. And so AI can also help you really build that business. So it can help with content creation, it can help you with branding if you're going out there sourcing your own deals off-market, you can create communications to reach out to people and do it in very creative ways.

I mean, for anyone that hasn't played with ChatGPT, go in there and just have it write something for you, and your mind will be blown. Because it's able to write things that we could never think of because it's pulling data and using machine learning to come up with so-called new things, but in a way that our human brains can do in that kind of, I guess, flexibility and variety.

So, yeah, when it comes to AI, the sky's the limit.

Seth: ChatGPT, I've got the pro version. I think it's $20 a month I'm paying and it's hands down, like by hundreds of miles, the most valuable $20 a month that I'm paying for anything right now. Just given everything you can do with that, it's like having the most brilliant employee in the world, right there even more than that because it's smarter than any human.

Going back to the whole idea of deal analysis or using plugins and that kind of thing. So I guess in order to analyze a deal, it first needs to understand, “What is a deal? What do you want? Are you analyzing vacant land? Are you analyzing multifamily apartment building? What are you trying to do?”

So I think my understanding is that it's really important to understand how to prompt it right. That's really the key to everything. It's like telling it what you want and being really specific, and when it gives you a result that isn't really what you want, tell it that. Tell it that it's not right and why it's not right and what you're actually looking for. Or if it gives you general instructions on how to do something, but it's missing a lot of specifics, ask it for more specifics: “Explain this for me. Give me step-by-step instructions on how to do this one thing that you mentioned in your response.”

So in terms of analyzing a deal, do you have any premade prompts or anything? Say, if you're trying to analyze a rental property to see if it's, I don't know, like, figuring out if it has sufficient cash flow or something? How do you adequately explain that to ChatGPT? Like, is there some kind of copy-and-paste formula? Like, boom, you put that in, then you paste in the numbers, tell me if it's a good deal or not.

I don't know if you thought through it that much or if you have that much organization to how you do it, but any thoughts on that?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great question, Seth. For me, I haven't necessarily come up with a specific prompt, and the reason why is that ChatGPT will fill in the blanks to a certain extent. If you tell it explicitly what you want as an outcome—you're like, “All right, I'm looking for an investment property that has three bedrooms, two baths. I want to put down 20%, and I want to be able to cash flow at least $300 to $400 every single month after principal interest and tax”— then it's going to spit out something very specific based on what you ask.

Now, if you don't know how to ask it that specifically, maybe you're a new investor and you don't even know to think about principal interest payments and debt service and taxes or insurance, then it's going to say, “All right, well, here's the general numbers, but have you considered the principal payments and the interest and the taxes and all those things?” And then you're like, “Okay, let me go find that.”

Or if you're not familiar with the term, you can be like, “What's this principal and interest thing?” And then it’s like, “Okay, well, this is your mortgage, right? And this is what you're going to have to pay on a monthly basis. And so you want to factor this into your monthly cash flow.”

So that's why the great thing about ChatGPT is that it will prompt you if you're asking the right things, if you're thinking about what your outcome is, and then you're asking it more and more questions, it'll interact with you in that regard. And so that's why it's so powerful. This is why the AI is so powerful because it's able to interact with you dynamically versus us having to just program it explicitly.

And so there are certain times, though, where you want to be very specific. And yes, if you had the prompt set up from the get-go and said, “Here are all the variables” and you feed it all at once, then, of course, you're going to get a better output quicker and faster. However, it's a great learning tool just as an investor, just to go in and just start learning by doing, and it's going to just fill in those gaps.

Back in the day, Ajay, I think you're pretty young, but back in the day, we had to actually read books, right? And we had to actually get on our pencils and paper and fill in the deal numbers and figure it out with the calculator. But then, of course, the internet came along and we got web applications and so this is the next step—to use AI to interact directly.

One of the other cool things on a related note that I just did actually yesterday was I'm looking at a syndicated deal, and so they do this prospectus and they do this pro forma or whatever, and so they put it into PDF format. And with ChatGPT, there are these different plugins that you can use to actually go in and analyze the PDF. So, for example, I said, “Okay, here's the link to the PDF. I want you to give me the summary of this entire deal and explain it to me on a very basic level.” So it goes in, it gives me the highlights of the deal. Everything I'm looking at shows me the equity split. But the great thing about that is if some of that is not very familiar to you, you can be like, well, explain to me the equity split, right, and it starts educating you on what that looks like and how it usually is broken out and different things.

And so, again, as an investor, the more information we have, the better educated decisions we can make and the more likelihood that we're going to get a decent return over time. Being able to use this AI is just really changing the game in terms of educating ourselves, of getting back quality information, and then ultimately being able to get to a decision faster so that we can execute quicker than everyone else.

Seth: Ajay, what's been your experience with AI so far? Have you done anything in particular? Have you found it useful in any way?

Ajay: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not going to lie, we use ChatGPT as a glorified copywriter, right? So a majority of what we've done thus far has been we'll use it to script Launch Control templates sometimes. And for those that don't know, Launch Control is a texting SMS blast software, so you can send out a bunch of messages, cold SMS, to prospective sellers. But we'll use it to actually help us generate scripts. And we'll use it for property listings more often than not because, as land flippers, we're always going through inventory. And so rather than spending 15 or 20 minutes drafting this up, now we just say, “Hey, ChatGPT, write a property listing for a piece of land on a 40-acre parcel in Trinidad, Colorado,” and it whips up this articulate, beautiful message.

But I bring that all up to say thus far, we've only used it as a glorified copywriter. But as I'm listening to Michael speak, I'm recognizing two things, okay? Number one, the power of communication. Because frankly, I don't want to say can't, but you are limited in how you can leverage AI if you can't communicate and articulate to the AI what your objective is, right? And I think sometimes, as investors and people, we have this gap between what our goals are, what the objective is, and it actually stops us from achieving what we think we want because we haven't actually clearly defined what we do. So that's, number one, is even with AI as a tool, we as people, and especially as investors, really need to be able to articulate what it is we're trying to accomplish in order to leverage those tools.

But number two, again, as Michael's speaking, I'm recognizing our job as investors is to gather information and make a decision to the best of our ability. And so I think as we all sit down and think about, okay, what can this do for my business, I would almost sit down and plot out what are all the regular decisions that we are making, right? And where can we leverage AI to help us gather information to make those decisions. And you may be surprised what frameworks end up coming out of that.

Like, I know for us right now in my business, we've got four on staff. I have a COO and partner, Ben. And Ben and I were chatting the other day about how every time we have a deal that gets basically a contract signed, it's like, okay, are we double closing? If we're double closing, are we self-listing? Are we listing with a realtor versus? Are we funding versus? Are we getting a funder versus? And there's all these different options, and it's like, okay, hang on. What information do we need to make these decisions? And then how do we feed it through?

Anyway, I bring that all up to say, number one, we're only using this as a glorified copywriter. But number two, I'm recognizing every time there's a decision point we can really leverage AI as long as we can effectively communicate our objective in order to extract that information to make the decision how we're supposed to as executives of our business. Right?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point.

Seth: On that whole thing about communicating effectively. So I got really into this for about a month or so back in, I don't know, when I first heard about it, I learned a bunch of different prompts. There's this website called PromptBase where back before it was commonly known how to do prompts and all this stuff, people were trying to come up with all these fancy ways to give it prompts and stuff, which actually is not that necessary. Like, just think of what do you want and just communicate that that's what I got to do.

But I collected a bunch of these different prompts, and one of the ones that I found was just getting general business advice from ChatGPT and I found it was actually pretty fascinating what it would come up with. I haven't done this yet as we're talking, but I'm going to try to come up with a handful of prompts that I've found useful because I've been collecting these things just in case I ever want to use them again. But one of them, you can just type this into ChatGPT, say I have a business where and then describe your business, and then state what the challenge is to your business, what is the problem, and then ask it, “What are some creative ideas I can do to solve this problem?”

So, for example, in a land business, I could say I have a business where I buy and sell vacant land around the United States. However, there are many other land investors popping up around the country that are copying the exact same ideas and trying to buy the same properties I'm going after, which drives up my acquisition cost significantly. What are some creative ideas that I can do to make my land investing business more unique and build a moat around myself and differentiate myself from my competition? So you can see there in the way that I worded that I got really specific about what the problem was. I didn't just lob this broad issue out there, I really stated what the problem was and then what I want to do to fix it. And I can copy and paste what ChatGPT told me, but it's kind of profound just in the fact some of the ideas may be things that you've thought of before, but some of them you probably haven't thought of before and it's like, oh wow, maybe I could try that, maybe I could totally do that.

And some of the ideas it tosses out there are like: specialization, choose to focus on a specific niche that you know well or that others have overlooked; provide additional services rather than just buying and selling land yourself; considering value-added services like consultation on land development; or connecting buyers with architects or builders or local authorities. You can build a brand, you can build relationships, you can develop a technological advantage.

It goes on and on and on and on from that one little prompt, it's like the tip of the iceberg. There is so much you can do if you can just think of what do I want? What is the problem? And have I even thought through that problem that, well, can I articulate what the problem is? Because if I can't, I can't expect anybody to help me. But the more specific I can get, the more likely you can get help from something like ChatGPT.

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point, Seth, and I think you're right in that the more articulate you are on the outcome that you want is the place that you want to start. And so I was saying that it'll ask you questions back, but unless you're able to articulate the full outcome, then it's going to be a little bit hard because if you give it garbage in, you're going to get garbage out.

So sometimes people are like, oh, this doesn't really work, this is so generic. And the reason why is because, yes, you're not prompting at the specific level that Seth just gave, an example that was very specific. And so that's fantastic.

One of the things, Seth, I don't even know if you know, at the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, I launched a wealth builders mastermind group. And so one of the things that I was doing prior to getting there was I launched this business essentially in a matter of weeks, just because I was using AI to help me to create all the content and come up with the ideas, give me the framework, even gave me legal elements that would have taken forever before.

And so the nice thing is that you can also prompt ChatGPT to write in someone's specific style. So, for example, there are very good copywriters out there, people like Ray Edwards or Donald Miller, that have a framework that is called story brand, and so you can actually tell ChatGPT, “Hey, can you write my copy such that it follows the structure of Donald Miller's story brand?” And it'll actually create the structure. So if you guys are curious, if you go to WBMM.org—that's the wealth builders mastermind website—you can see the copy that it's created because literally the majority of that is all created through ChatGPT. But with that said, you do have to add in your own personal elements, right? So it's going to do, I think, a lot of heavy lifting, but you still want to obviously have that human element that you're going in and tweaking things so that it sounds more like yourself.

Now, on the other side of things, one of the things that we haven't talked about yet with AI is in terms of we talked about content creation. We talked about just analysis and acquisition research. Another thing that AI does really well is creation. And this is the part that's kind of freaky to some degree, because not only able to create images out of thin air that didn't exist before, that are photorealistic high resolution. Now it's getting to the point where it's able to create video on top of that, and then it's going to be able to create virtual environments as well.

But one of the cool things is if you're a real estate investor and you're creating a brand, you can go into websites like Looka.com, and they use AI to help you generate a brand presence. And so if you go back again to look at this website that I created for the real estate wealth builders mastermind, the logo is all AI-generated. And it's something that I was able to create really quickly. And I said, okay, let's try all these different things. And it gave me different things that I could tweak, but I found something that I liked, and then I'm like, all right, I want to buy it. And it was only $100.

And then all of a sudden, they're giving me full, high-res images, vector files for Illustrator, basically the entire image package, which before you would have to go direct to a designer, you would have to actually go back and forth. And you'd have to rely on that designer to kind of read your mind in terms of what you want versus if you're just specifically telling AI, okay, this is what I want. And if you don't know what you want, they're giving you ideas, and then you're just tweaking it. I think it's the best of both worlds. And so I think AI is also really at the forefront of just being able to create things and help us to imagine things that didn't exist before.

So one of the things that, I guess back during COVID, I was selling a property in San Diego, and I wanted to sell it by myself. So I did a for sale by owner. And so I'm listing it, and I didn't have it furnished. And so I was like, do I want to actually go out there and furnish this thing and stage it? And it was going to be another, like, four or five grand. And I was like, “Well, yeah, I should probably do that, because you potentially get a much better return,” but then I was like, “Well, maybe not. Let me see what technologies are out there.”

And this was before AI, so they had designers that would actually go in and virtually stage. So some of you have likely seen this at this point, right? But you're basically sending them a picture of an empty room, and then they're actually putting in furniture with the right perspective and elements and whatnot. And so they would get back to me and with a day of me asking them to put together a specific picture and it was amazing and I used it and it did well and I didn't have to actually stage it and people could conceptualize what that looked like and sell the dream, so to speak, right?

But today, with AI, there's sites where you can literally just send a picture and you get it back in like seconds, like 30 seconds or a minute or whatever, and it's doing more or less the same thing, except now it's AI-generated. And so again, the speed.

Seth: What are some of those sites?

Michael: Okay, so if you want to play around with this AI-powered interior design, you can go to VirtualStagingAI.app. And that's where you can just take a picture and upload it to them and tell them, hey, I want something in a contemporary style. And they're going to just come up with different ideas.

And then there's another one called InteriorAI.com, and this is a similar idea. This one's a little bit more robust. It'll give you more ideas, knock down walls, and really create a different look in the space. And those are just two, but there's a ton of them, so they're constantly coming out.

One of the things that you should be aware of, just that this artificial intelligence space is so dynamic and there are tools that are constantly coming out and some of them are going as well. One of the greatest websites out there is called There’s An AI For That.

Seth: Interesting.

Michael: And if you go there, you can see there's literally probably like 4,000 different AI apps that have basically come to fruition after ChatGPT came out, Midjourney, and all these major platforms that really are kind of pushing the envelope of AI development and they're building on top of that.

So, yeah, There’s An AI For That, and it'll show you all the trending programs. It'll also show you the trending plugins and different things that are related to AI and you can get a good sense of what's popular and what's actually working, or the brand new ones that just came out out, literally zero day. So you can see what just came out today and there's usually several, if not dozens coming out every single day. So it's moving quickly and certain ones are better than others for sure. Part of it is just playing with it and seeing if it works for you and your goals.

Seth: That was going to be one of my questions for you, is like, do you know of many places that list all the best AI websites out there right now? It sounds like you just gave that to us.

So that's one of the things that's kind of been blowing my mind because I follow this guy on YouTube named Matt Wolfe, who does a really good job of talking about all the new stuff going on in the past week in the AI world, and there's just tons of stuff happening. And he rattles off all these websites and it's like, man, I mean, just learning how to use one of them is like its own little job, like you said. Some of them just probably just disappear overnight because they become obsolete or something.

And even between the time that we're recording this and the time that it goes live, honestly, one of my concerns is that what we talk about today is not relevant anymore. It's changing that quickly. But hopefully there's general advice people can take away from this nevertheless.

Michael: Well, one of the interesting things as well, Seth and Ajay, and one of the areas that I think is going to be still definitely relevant (whenever this does ultimately air) is the video creation and the audio enhancement. So, for example, there are tools like Descript. Have you heard of Descript, Seth? It's basically video and audio editing, but they're integrating AI to the point where you're able to edit videos by just deleting text, like a Word document. And then you're able to enhance the sound and remove all the background noise by just clicking a button. And on top of that, you can actually clone your own voice.

And so there's real, I think, positive implications as well as negative implications with that, right? But you can clone someone's voice. And so, for example, I have a podcast called Breakthrough Millionaire where there are a lot of times where I'm in there and I might have missed something in my intro or I forgot to say something, or maybe it didn't sound exactly as I wanted to say. I can go into Descript and I can literally highlight the words that I said and then I can overlay—let's call it “overdub.” And I can change it to whatever I wanted it to say. And because it knows my voice, it can fill in those words and the majority of people will never know that that wasn't me.

Now, is it perfect? Not yet, but it's getting there. And that's the scary thing. You're not going to necessarily know what's real or not real because along with the audio is also coming video where you can have these avatars that are actually speaking as you, can have the likeness of you, or you can look totally different.

And so the reason why I bring this up is because, as real estate investors, consider the power of being able to go out and prospect virtually. Ajay, you're talking about doing the text blast, right? But it's a personalized message to the person. And all of a sudden, Seth's coming up on their phones like, “Hey, I just want to drop you a quick message. I see you got this property out there. Any interest in selling it? I'm a real estate investor. I can give you full cash offer. Let me know.” And it's literally a video talking to that person, and they're like, “Oh, that's different than just a text.” And all of a sudden they're able to respond back, right? And then Seth could literally send something back.

And the crazy thing is that it doesn't even need to be Seth. It could literally be Ajay, like sitting there behind the computer, replying as Seth in his voice and his avatar, and people wouldn't know, and people will not know going forward in the future.

Now, of course, there are some moral implications with this, right? What you can do with this technology and this power or whatnot. Unfortunately, there are people here that are getting scammed already. People are cloning voices and saying, “Hey, I need you to send me money.” I think I saw on 48 Hours someone cloned the voice of parents' daughter, right? And she said, oh, I just got in this huge accident. I need money right now, or whatever. She sent her like 20 or 30 grand, and it wasn't even her, right? She was off at a camp somewhere during the summer.

So, again, with any technology, there's going to be good and bad, right? And so we got to have to navigate that. But as investors, if we can use these tools to our advantage and do it in a way that, I think, is a value-add and in a way that's morally intact, I think why not, right? Why not create a better experience? Why not create win-wins for everyone across the board and be much more efficient?

Seth: Yeah. On that note, I mean, I've heard a lot of doom and gloom about AI and how it's going to outsmart us in the near future. Its IQ was already kind of at a genius level, and it's getting to the point where it's so smart that it can speak in words that we don't even understand. It's just so far beyond us. We're talking in the next couple of years kind of thing.

And it makes me wonder, are you scared at all, or are you having any concerns about this or what are your thoughts? Should we be more excited or should we be terrified? Or a little bit of both? How do you think through that?

Michael: A little bit of both. I definitely do have some concerns because having a technology background, part of the reason why I play with this so much is because I just love technology and kind of seeing how things work and how it will impact society, for good or for bad.

And as I listen to the people that are at the forefront of AI and the developers and the people that are pushing the envelope in this space, there was one guy that basically shared that about 50% of the people, the main developers that are actually building these models out, feel like there's a 10% chance that AI is going to destroy humanity in some form or sense. And I was like, well, that's not good because if you had 50% of the engineers that worked on your airplane think that there's a 10% chance that the plane is going to go down over the Atlantic Ocean, then I think I'd be a little wary of getting on that plane. So definitely, I think, as a community, we have to be aware of what's happening and we have to vote with our thoughts and our dollars and whatever else. Just be aware of kind of like what's happening in this space because it's moving so quickly.

Like you said, Seth, a lot of times regulators and government entities, they can't keep up, right? I mean, it's seriously to that point. No different than with a lot of the stuff with crypto and all that stuff. I mean, they were so far behind and now they're finally trying to play some catch-up. Same thing with AI. And so that becomes a real question in terms of what our responsibility is as citizens, right? How do we voice our opinion? I think we vote with our dollars. And we also vote with how we share ideas with other people.

And yes, I do think it can be a little scary because if you think about this technology, AI is doing things that the original developers never intended and it's essentially learning on its own. I think one of the first things was it started understanding Farsi before they even told it to figure out and understand different languages. And so they're like, that's interesting. And so we're going to see a lot more of these what's called emergent qualities of AI. And because we can't predict that, then I think we do have a responsibility to kind of figure out how do you put certain guardrails in place, or can you? And if you can't, then should you be pushing this out as quickly as you are?

And so the main debate right now is OpenAI, which is the one that released ChatGPT, their idea is that we just kind of push it out and we'll kind of tweak it as is after we see how the public reacts versus other companies like Google. They're more of the thought that, okay, let's kind of slowly trickle this out.

So who's right or wrong? I'm not sure. But what I do know is that there are going to be major implications, positively as well as negatively in medicine. There's going to be huge leaps forward with just being able to sequence genomes faster, better, being able to identify things that we couldn't do before. And so that's going to be fantastic. And then, of course, on the other side of things, people are going to get scammed in ways that you could never have ever dreamed of, which is just so sad.

And as well as one of the things, Seth, I don't know if you thought about, but if we're talking like 20or 30 years from now, what if AI is so good and it automates all of our processes such that we all physically don't have to really work in the traditional sense? There's no more manual labor, there's no more thought, and we have a certain just level of, I don't know, sustenance of food and shelter. And we're just sitting there and I kind of think about that. I'm like, our minds are just going to melt. We're going to become this devolved humanoid. But hopefully…

Ajay: Can I jump in here? There are a lot of good thoughts going on here. Michael, I think just to loop back really quickly with Seth's initial question kind of around the doom and gloom that some folks talk about, I see that through two perspectives. Number one is I heard this quote once, and regardless of how you feel about it, gives me a lot of peace. And it goes something like, evil only wins if the good sit idle.

Michael: Right?

Ajay: And so I just think there are more good than bad out there and there's seasons of more one than the other, and we don't need to dive into that. But I do think there is a lot of good here, and there's a risk with AI. But I think the good will ultimately win. In the event that it doesn't, it is so far out of my control that I am not going to sit around and think about it truly, right?

Because let's say, I mean, let's just be honest in your metaphor about the plane. We're on the plane. The engineers are tinkering, but we're on the plane. So if it's going down, I'm going to enjoy the rest of my time on it, more or less, right? But those two thoughts give me peace in the sense of like, I'm going to focus on what I can control and continue trekking forward.

Now, I had an interesting thought, actually, as you were speaking about. Let's say AI does solve all our problems. There's this really interesting podcast. It's a Joe Rogan episode with Naval Ravikant. If anybody's followed any of his stuff. Naval has a book published about him by, I think it's Ryan Holiday and somebody else called The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. And it's absolutely phenomenal for anyone that hasn't.

But anyways, to circle back in that interview with Joe Rogan, Naval speaks about how he believes everyone can be rich. So it's not a matter of one versus another or how some may need to have it all in maybe a regular capitalistic society, for example, but how there are abundant resources on Earth and we do have the ability for everybody to be wealthy. And so, as we talk about that, his descriptor of the world was our job would actually be to entertain one another.

So rather than, maybe we become docile—I mean, there are always some folks that just have an inherent drive and personality to push things forward and others that do not. And in his hypothetical utopia that he laid out on this podcast, it ended us with us all entertaining one another.

So, Seth, you would be the man. Everybody would, “Seth, can you juggle yet, by the way?”

Seth: No, not really.

Ajay: You've got time.

Seth: Did you guys happen to catch the thing earlier this year where the founder of TikTok went before Congress and testified and the Congress people were, like, questioning him and all this stuff?

I just caught random clips of it. Maybe it was the clips that I saw, but it struck me I remember thinking the same thing when Mark Zuckerberg got grilled by Congress. Same kind of thing. It struck me how clueless the people in Congress seemed like. It was like a bunch of our grandparents were trying to lecture this owner of one of the most highly advanced companies in the world about the right way to run their company. And these people don't even understand what social media is, hardly.

I mean, they're good at sounding mad in giving their speeches on their soapboxes, but they don't really understand anything. It felt like, yeah, I just almost kind of just felt embarrassed watching it. Not that they're wrong to be concerned, but it was just very evident that these are not the experts in the room. And it's kind of laughable that they're trying to tell this person how to run the company, but it makes me think about this AI stuff. So these are the same people in charge of regulating this technology that they absolutely do not understand. There's just no question about it. So that's a little concerning to me.

And also, I didn't actually see this interview, but I heard a commentary about it. Apparently, the CEO of Google was talking about how they don't actually want to be pushing this stuff out at such a fast rate, but they have to. They can't stop because the future of their company depends on it. And all these other companies are marching forward with huge progress very quickly, so they can't just put the brakes on and stop it. So there's kind of like this thing where everyone was just pushing so hard to be on the cutting edge. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is miles behind in terms of figuring out how to regulate it.

I guess, Ajay, you kind of addressed it as best as we can in terms of, like, we don't really have control over this. So it's like, what's the point of losing sleep over it? But it will be very interesting to see how this gets figured out in the years to come because I'm positive that the advances will outpace regulation. I mean, it already kind of has.

Ajay: Right? And I think, to Michael's point, I can't remember how you worded this, Michael, but you said it beautifully, that our dollars have a vote or something to that effect. Right.

And I do think, and I don't want to turn this anywhere near political, but there is an element worth noting that government was formed, like how we know it today, during times when innovation was not nearly as rapid as it was. Like, I remember in government classes, studying what you need for civilization had six core things. We don't need to get into those, but one of them was government.

And the way the government was designed, more or less as we know it today, has all happened in the past, most recently, like a couple hundred years ago. And there are some changes and amendments, but overall the structure was more or less formed a couple hundred years ago. Back then, riding horses was innovative, right? Corn was considered an innovation back then. And that was considered innovative for three generations, mind you.

So there's something worth noting here that, at some level, our dollars do need to signify change. I have no idea what that means, but Seth, I think it's a very valid thing to point out.

Seth: Corn was considered innovative.

Ajay: That's the soundbite for the beginning of this.

Seth: In terms of like, what we should expect from AI—and again, this is changing rapidly, so we're not going to hold you to this—but as of summer of 2023, what should a person expect from artificial intelligence? I guess in the case of, say, if you're using ChatGPT, you're trying to analyze a deal or any of these other previous real estate uses we mentioned earlier, at what point should they say, “No, AI should be able to do more?”

For me, I'm going to keep pushing it and see what it can do versus “Let's just not go there. It's unreasonable to expect a computer to solve my problems here. I need to step in and do this myself.” Any ideas on where that line currently is or where it ought to be?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great question. I think we're going to just continually see AI evolve. And we're going to see it in the workplace, we're going to see it in investing. And essentially, the companies that are able to make use of the technology to actually get a customer or client or a specific outcome are going to be able to perform well and they're going to be able to grow their businesses.

So we're seeing a ton of innovation in this space and quickly. And like anything else, the cream is going to rise to the top. Right? And so those companies that are pushing the envelope, that are creating a quality product, are going to win and help people, help investors. And the great thing about, I think, for us as real estate investors, is we haven't really seen anything very specific yet.

So REtipster community, hey, if you have some great idea of how to leverage AI and really build on top of a platform. You could go out there right now. I think it's the Wild West in terms of being able to stake your claim and be able to build something that could be massively successful over the next few years. And so it's a very unique opportunity for entrepreneurs, I think, specifically in real estate.

But of course, across the board as well, going forward in the future, what I see and where I kind of get excited is the integration of AI and virtual environments. So I don't know if you guys saw it, but Apple just released their headset. And, of course, it's way too expensive to buy right now. It's like $3,500 or whatever it is. But the implication of that is that we're still moving in this direction.

And so AR is augmented reality, which means that you're not necessarily in a complete virtual environment. You're in augmented reality, meaning that you could wear a headset or, in the future, ideally just a pair of glasses where you're observing your physical world, but you're getting digital elements integrated.

So imagine if you're a real estate investor, you're going to walk a property or walk a piece of land, right? And it's giving you all the specifics, like the tax history, all the different elements of the build, and it's telling you, Grandma Josephine died here. It has everything that you could think of, right? And it just is just feeding it to you through visual cues and it's pointing it out to you, and you're not even having to ask it. It's just information at your fingertips. That's where we're going.

The technology is such where there are things like LiDAR and NeRF (neural radiance field) technologies where you can just literally look at things, and it's going to be mapping things, 3D, and then you're going to be able to go back and record those and then go back and re-walk it later so you don't have to. Already we're at the point where you can go in and view properties and, I think, zoom around, right? There are some 3D technologies that are interesting. They're not perfect, but there's going to come a point very soon where you can literally just walk a property, and it's almost like you're there. And so that's where I think it's pretty exciting, where AI is going to push the envelope for VR and AR.

And then, as investors, I think we're going to really get, again, access to more data quicker, better, and faster. The people that adopt this and that see this coming, I think, are going to be the ones that are going to ultimately do better. One of the things that I really learned early on as a real estate investor was that you have to execute and execute quickly. And for good or for bad, things are going to even accelerate, even quicker now, and so you're going to have to be on the ball. But if you're using this technology and you're at the forefront, then you're going to be able to execute quicker than everyone else.

And I think that's really the key of keeping AI in the back of your head, just seeing what's going on, going to There’s An AI For That occasionally and just kind of seeing what's out there and being like, all right, let me do a search for real estate, and then seeing what's available. And again, if you don't see something, you can piece together different things, like we were talking about using ChatGPT with the PDF prompts. You can use different AI plugins to parse MLS data. Ajay was talking about using the text to create creative content or this very specific content. We're going to be seeing the avatars, you're going to be seeing the text or voice come out, and just have a much, I think, more engaging interaction with our prospects.

And the cool thing here is that what if you have a deal and you feed the information about, let's say, Grandpa Joe. He wants to exit a property, but he also wants to have a little cash flow. So maybe you're going to have him hold a note, right? You can actually have ChatGPT structure a deal for you and say, “Hey, these are all the requirements. How can I structure this so that Grandpa Joe feels taken care of? I'm making out decently as an investor, and it's creative enough that it can actually create that structure.”

So to your point, Seth, I think the sky is the limit in terms of what we can do with this technology, but we have to also have some creativity and then be very specific on what the outcome is that we want to create. And then from there, yeah, I think it's fun and I think it's a value-add in the long term.

Seth: I really like that idea of trying to make this deal work because a lot of times, there are ways to make a deal work that you just haven't thought of because you're not familiar with how it can work. Or maybe your brain just isn't working right that day. Or maybe it's something you've never tried before. And to that point, like, say if one of the suggestions is, have you considered an option or something like that or something that you don't really fully understand, you can then ask it, “Please explain further, how does this work? How would you suggest I proceed with making this type of offer?” and keep going until you get it and it'll keep explaining it to you?

I know since we're kind of on the subject of different uses for AI, so I've noticed a lot of these AI websites that are popping up, like There’s An AI For That, a lot of these specialized websites. What they seem to be doing is just taking what's already there, like ChatGPT, and just kind of like packaging it in a certain way for a specific purpose and putting it on a different platform and making it feel like a different product, but it's kind of just pulling from the same thing. Like you could probably do it for free or for a cheaper subscription through ChatGPT.

In some of my own playing around with it over the past few months, I've used ChatGPT to create legal language for contracts. There was an option contract that I had my attorney put together and my goal was to keep this thing as short and concise as possible. And the way that he was wording things was just like really wordy and just rambling. And I would get to the end of a clause and not even understand what I just read. I was just like, “What?”

And I think he was doing that because he's an attorney and he wants to look smart and all this stuff but that was totally contrary to what I was trying to do. So I took the sections that I thought were too wordy and I put them in ChatGPT and I just said please make this more concise, like limit it to one or two sentences and make it easy enough for a ten-year-old to understand. And I did that and I sent it back to my attorney without telling him that ChatGPT did it. And I said hey, would this work? And he's like, yeah, that would work.

So I mean, right there, he was acting as my lawyer. I mean, that's literally what I just did. I'm not suggesting people do that, but I'm just saying it worked for me.

Another thing you can do, kind of like what Ajay was talking about, is copywriting. That's a huge use case for a lot of different types of businesses. It takes a lot of thought to do good sales copy and it can do it in the snap of a finger, and it's good. You might need to tweak some things but the hardest stuff can really be done for you.

I've also used it to sort messy lists sometimes. Like if you've ever gotten a delinquent tax list in the land business, the county's format will just be all jumbled up. Like the information is put out horizontally instead of vertically. If you had to manually sort that, I mean, I've literally spent like 8 hours reformatting these lists. You can paste that kind of thing into ChatGPT and tell it to reorganize it and put it in the table and it'll do it for you.

There's also the business advice thing we talked about earlier. You can summarize long text if you have just this huge block of text and it's too long to read or if you don't understand what it's saying, you can just tell it to summarize it for you and explain it like you're five years old and it'll make it super concise and clear.

I had an electrician send me something in an email where he's like, yeah, we're going to take this thing and we're going to home run it and do a series thing and stuff that makes tons of sense to an electrician, but I'm not an electrician, I don't know what he's talking about. And so I pasted that on ChatGPT and I said, please translate this for me for my electrician, and it cleared it up instantly.

So, again, just basically anytime you encounter any problem related to communication of some kind, ChatGPT can probably help with that. Or content creation of some kind. I mean, the use cases just go on and on and on.

Ajay: Including Farsi, apparently. Right, Michael?

Seth: Yes.

Ajay: Now that's really cool. Seth and as we've been chatting, actually, I'm curious, I might test a couple of things here soon in our business. Like something I've been—I don't use the word preaching—but preaching at people recently is how we don't do enough to build trust in this business or walk people through their customer journey. So, like, in our business, we have attached to every e-contract, we send out the customer journey that somebody's going to go through. And that way, it assigns roles and responsibilities, and you have general timelines of, “Hey, seller, if you sign this document, in three weeks, this thing happens.” And then here's the trigger for that. And then it goes through, and it's this pretty little graphic with a road going through it. But we're spinning stuff up like that all the time to build trust and credibility with sellers.

But I usually just get on Fiverr or Upwork and pay some graphic designer to do it. And now I'm curious, could I have AI do something like this? Aside from that, you mentioned video. Could I record a base video? Because another acquisition strategy we use is we actually send Loom videos to sellers sometimes, so if we can't get in touch with them again, this is a marketing and sales business in real estate, right? And so, I need to market in a way to invoke responses with my sellers. And so we'll do all kinds of funky stuff to try to get “Hey, they said they were interested in selling. We can't get a hold of them or we sent a contract to them and they haven't signed yet. Let's figure out what we need to do.”

But sending video has been really, really successful for us. But it always takes time and you need to craft the message and you want to make it personal. And now I'm like, could we have AI just sort of scrub out the name and some of the details and use our voice to rewrite it?

So I'm really curious. Seth, I'll be sure to test things to be posted in the REtipster community and the Facebook group in the least as well, just so I can share my lessons with everybody as we're doing this.

Seth: And I do know one, I just mentioned this because I was using this a couple of days ago. There is a mobile app called DealMachine that's been around for a number of years now. It's like the best app ever if you are into driving for dollars where you drive around and specifically see a property with your own eyes and you want to contact the seller and you can do a lot of other stuff with it too. But that was sort of the original purpose for the app.

But they've just recently integrated a bunch of really good AI right into the app. Like when you add a lead, it'll give you a bunch of different ways you can use AI right there. And I thought it was worth mentioning just because some of these things I had never really thought of before. So one of them right at the very top is “Help me analyze this property,” whatever that means, that Michael had mentioned that earlier. But another way is like “Help me write an SMS message to send to the owner,” or “Help me write a cold call script,” “Help me calculate the offer price,” “Help me find a title company,” ‘Help me to calculate repairs on the property,” “Help me to practice negotiating,” “How do I find cash buyers,” “How do I find renters.”

Like it shows you all this stuff specific to that deal in that location based on the numbers that you have. Maybe you're in a conversation with somebody who has emailed you about selling their property and they don't sound particularly motivated, or maybe they're demanding a price that's way higher than you want and you're just trying to figure like, what do I say? How do I even respond to this in a way that's going to not mess everything up? I have this dilemma all the time, like how do I just keep this going and not destroy the deal right there?

ChatGPT. I mean, you can paste that person's response in there and help me generate a response that will keep the conversation going, that will make them feel validated, and help me to continue negotiating a lower price.

And again, it kind of comes back to your ability to communicate and understand in the first place what you even want and how to use ChatGPT to help you out with that.

Michael: There's an interesting thing that's happening as well. Have you seen AutoGPT? So essentially what this is, is they're called AI agents. And so AI agents are the idea that you can use ChatGPT or some sort of AI model to do multiple tasks based off of a larger outcome.

So let's just say, for example, as an investor, right, it's like I want to acquire a property. Let's go back to our example. Three bedroom, two bath house with $300 to $400 of cash flow after 20% down. And in theory, it can start to kind of piece together the overall puzzle and say, okay, well, you want this? How can I execute this for you?

First it's going to go parse the MLS and figure out, okay, what are the potential prospects? Then it's going to potentially find the listing agents. And then it's going to reach out to them and send them a message. And then it's going to interact with them and negotiate based off of a parameter that you may have already set forth.

And then let's just say you get a verbal confirmation. So you make the offer and ChatGPT is analyzing the offer, and then ultimately, it can negotiate the entire escrow process, theoretically.

And so this is, I think, where it's going to go. We're not there yet, but they're starting to work on these things. And I think, again, it's important to kind of know where the AI is going. Right now we're getting excited about these individual tasks that it can do. However, as we go forward in the future, a lot of this is going to automate the entire process. And so if we think about the ramifications of that and all of a sudden you're just like, all right, go find me a house with these parameters. And if you find it, execute on it. And it's doing everything in the background, I think that's where your mind really starts to kind of open up to the power of AI.

And this is something that we've never seen this technology before in human history, of course. So this is where it's kind of really leapfrogging where we were. It's been around for a while, but it's really come to the forefront in the last year. But just leapfrogging from last year to this year. And going forward, we're going to see things that we couldn't have even imagined just like a few years ago.

Seth: I think the devil is in the details. Usually when things fall apart and go wrong, it's when there's some little thing in the fine print or the code that somebody just overlooked. And this is very true in the finance and accounting world. That's usually where a lot of the worst things are hidden. And it's when people kind of get a little lazy in their thinking and it goes back to this whole automation thing and the belief that I can just push this button and this machine will go in motion and do it all for me.

And I think the challenge is that's becoming more and more true, it doesn't require nearly as much human involvement, but it still takes some. And I think that bar is kind of moving to a more sophisticated level where you really can get away with doing less and less work, but there still needs to be some involvement. So what is that? Where do you need to be involved? And where can you truly let go of the wheel and trust a computer to handle it for you?

And sometimes it varies. Like, I've seen this different times with ChatGPT where I prompt it and it gives me a perfect outcome and then other times I try to do a similar thing and it's not at all where it needs to be. I need to really hold its hand and keep guiding it.

But I guess I would encourage everybody. This whole idea behind automation is just recognizing that your involvement isn't completely done. Like you need to do something to make sure it's on the right track. And some people do not have a problem with this. I don't think I have a huge problem with it. If anything, I'm too involved. I overthink stuff. But I know several people who have the opposite issue where it's like they don't want to do anything and they'll just let go and deal with whatever consequences.

Ajay: Well, that's why it's called passive income, Seth, as all good real estate investors know.

Michael: Yeah, that's a really good point, Seth. I think especially currently, we definitely do still have to have involvement. I think when we're talking about full automation, we're still looking quite a ways out. And I think sometimes even I get excited about some of the things that can happen further out.

But a lot of times with technology, even like the internet, people are like, oh my gosh, it's going to revolutionize how we do business. And people are thinking within like two or three years, right? And then we're like 30 years later and it's like, oh, these things are actually coming to the forefront now. And they're actually as we thought they were going to be, but there was a much longer lag time, I think, than we anticipated. We'll see with AI, obviously, I think this has the potential to be exponential growth, so we'll have to see.

But sometimes, yeah, I think, like you said, Seth, we really want to make sure that we're dotting the I's and crossing the T's, especially in the beginning with technology because, yeah, it's not perfect by any means yet. We want to trust but verify and take everything with a grain of salt to a certain extent.

Seth: Yeah, for sure.

Well, Michael, I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us your wealth of knowledge and everything you know about AI. If people want to follow up with you or check out your stuff, is there a place they should go to see what you got going on?

Michael: Absolutely. Well, if you want to check out the Real Estate Wealth Builders Mastermind, we just launched that and that's been going really well. It's literally built by AI and it's functioned and it's attracted people and people have signed up. So it actually works. So if you want to see a live example of that, definitely go there.

And if you're interested in joining as well, just as an investor that wants to collaborate with other high-level investors, that's a place you can join us as well. And then, on the personal finance side of things, my site is called FinanciallyAlert.com, and you can go there if you want to learn about financial freedom and different ways to create passive income or side hustles and things of that nature.

And then I've got a podcast called Breakthrough Millionaire as well that talks a lot about mindset and being able to kind of break through lots of personal development and things of that nature.

So, yeah, thank you so much, Seth and Ajay. It's been really fun talking about this topic. I get I kind of geek out when we talk about anything technology-wise. And you've got a great community here, so I'm really fascinated to kind of see, in the Facebook group and what people are using it for, because it's really the individual, I think it's really the community that comes up with the best ideas out there. People that are doing things that we don't realize that they're doing. And so I have a feeling they're going to come up with some amazing ideas and applications.

Seth: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Michael. Appreciate it. And I'll talk to you soon.

Michael: Thanks, guys.